Adiemus
by nani'anela
Summary: AU. Sam is an Astral Projector, a human with a "detachable soul", and he can travel into other people's dreams and minds. Dean and his team of 3 Projectors impersonate Exorcists in order to illegally cure mental illnesses, & the team cures, cons, & kills their way across post-Apocalyptic America in a crappy camper. POV Dean, Young Winchesters- Sam is 19, Dean is 23. Asexual!Dean.
1. Chapter 1

Hi there! This was originally going to be an original story, but after working on it for around 6 months it came to a standstill. Hopefully by transfiguring it into a fanfic I'll be inspired to finally finish it, plus my characters make a pretty good fit already.  
>Let me know what you think :)<br>Side note: This is also a "Young Winchesters" fic: Sam is 19, Dean is 23, and Castiel is around 24.

The title is taken from a song composed by Karl Jenkins. It sounds like a Latin chant, but every word is actually just complete jibberish. That's the title here because their exorcisms are also faked, just like the "Latin" in his song.

* * *

><p>"Fuckin' blood." I mumbled under my breath as I scrubbed my hands clean under the less-than-optimal greenish lighting of a rank gas station bathroom.<p>

I'd let him go.

That was something I hadn't done, well, _ever_. I was still a little bit stunned at myself, to be completely honest. I felt strange. Numb, more like. What I'd done just so wasn't _me_.

Well, to be fair, it had been. _Once_. But that had been a long time ago. The very first time I'd had to beat a Churchmember to a bloody pulp and felt his very last breath brush up against my screaming knuckles, I'd crouched by his unconscious body for an hour afterwards. I'd muttered every prayer for forgiveness I knew, in Latin and English, tears leaking out of my eyes until my eyeballs felt like starch and my eyelids were swollen. It had been too close to when I'd severed my ties with the Church to do something like that, I realized now. I'd been a wreck, I'd dragged myself to some bar to wash off and then basically crawled back home. I wish I could have that kind of remorse now, instead of a twisted kind of triumph when I'd catch them. _Better start saving up to pay Charon now, right?_

I shook my head. No, I didn't want to think about that anymore. I focused instead at the task at hand. Now, I'll just say it.

Dealing with humans is downright _gross_.

They're always spurting their bodily fluids everywhere with no respect. The stuff I usually dealt with came out clean. There was maybe a little bit of ectoplasm here or there back when I had a job dealing with demons and the possessed, that was no biggie, and absolutely no cleanup when I got down to my current job.

This whole 'blood' thing was _so _not my thing.

Red swirled down the sink. In this failing fluorescent lighting, the blood looked blackish, the porcelain of the sink a washed-out green. I raised my eyes to the small, dirty mirror, noting the little bloom of black along one corner of the silver rectangle. Half of the glass was covered with an alluring, quick scribble of white graffiti which was floating, doubled, with its reflection behind it. I met my eyes as I scrubbed, the soap made my split knuckles smart.

The skin of my face looked almost cheesy in the bad lighting. My greenish eyes barely reflected any light, they seemed like twin dark buttons staring back at me.

I looked a mess, my cheeks were scruffy and I had dark swatches under my reddish eyes. I splashed my face, the scruff on my cheeks abrasive in my palms. My skin felt clammy even through a layer of warmish water, and met my reflection once again.

Damn, I looked so tired. My eyelids were puffy and the whites of my eyes were tinted a slight pink. _There you are, Scruffy Insomniac Dean. Well, hello again, old friend._

I'd have to hurry home before anybody noticed I was gone.

_Home_, I scoffed and worked a dark red stain from my sleeve. That's a laugh. Home to most wasn't a crappy camper van that you have to share with three others.

I finally admitted defeat and knew that this was as good as it was going to get, and splashed my face one more time before shutting the faucet off with a faint squeal.

I snatched up the bathroom key and dipped back into the gas station store. The fluorescent harsh lights illuminated the tiny store so completely that it almost gave it the illusion that it was somehow surreal, like it was on a different plane than the blanketing darkness outside.

"Thanks," I mumbled, placing the key back on the counter. I frowned as I noticed a bloody thumbprint on the rectangular plastic of the label on the key. Shoot. "Sorry, about that, just a second." I wet my finger with the tip of my tongue and smudged the print away.

"Uh, here you are." I handed it back to the cashier and laughed nervously. The man stared speechlessly at me, blinking dumbly like a farm animal. He'd had the same expression on his face when I'd come in. Looks like I'd officially spooked him. _Oops_. I had to fight back the urge to grin.

"Uh, for your trouble?" I dug out a crumpled bill from my pocket and plopped the wad down on the counter. "And that'll cover this too, right?" I snagged a slim jim and shot the poor guy what I hoped was a reassuring smile.

Then, I spotted something behind the counter, a peculiar flier taped to one of the windows behind the cashier that I hadn't noticed on the way in. I ambled out of the store and swung around toward the back, taking a few yanking bites of my slim jim.

I cocked my head to the side slightly and looked at the artist's rendition "Wanted" poster that had been taped up on the outside of the store. The black-and-white poster was divided into four cells of sketches. There was my younger brother Sam, his dark brown floppy locks messy as usual, his green eyes peering ever-innocently. _That's my brother, the human puppy._

Then there was the sketch of my friend Levi, a guy with his ginger-brown hair tied back into a wolftail and tattoos all the way up to his collarbones. The penultimate rendition was of Kara, an oval-faced Asian girl with pin-straight black hair parted down the middle, which framed her face like curtains. Even the small, devious smile the artist had drawn on her seemed to say "try and find me. I _dare _you."

The one of me barely even resembled me. My jaw couldn't nearly be _that_ square. And I know for a goddamn _fact_ my eyebrows aren't that perfect. And where were those beautiful purple undereye swatches?

Well, no wonder that churchmember Castiel hadn't recognized me right away when I'd met him. The dickwad drawn here looked like someone who, for starters, didn't beat the shit out of people under a highway overpass at two o' clock in the morning, or maybe a guy who actually washed their hair everyday or actually, _you know_, slept more than a rocky four hours a night.

_Nah, that's asking too much._ I chuckled to myself and tore the flier down, crumpling it into a little ball. I knew for a fact the only phone number on the flier had been the man's that my very hands balling the paper had beat up just a few moments ago. I tipped the paper ball into the trash bin, and it felt like a small weight had been lifted as I watched it fall into that miniature abyss.

The Church wasn't close to finding and capturing us anymore. That was all that mattered.

Sam had been keeping tabs on this man "Castiel" for as long as he'd been trailing us, peeking into his head and his dreams, but the churchman had thought he'd had it in the bag. It was almost cute, how much the guy thought he could have done it. _You can't catch someone who's been in your head, dick._

My little brother is an Astral Projector. So are the others in the cramped camper I'm living out of.

Basically, Projectors have souls that aren't always attached to their bodies like us normal people, and they get flung into God-knows-who's head at night, and they become forced spectators of strangers' dreams. They can try to get into a head on purpose, too, but that was more difficult.

People were afraid of my brother and people like him, especially the people from the Church. Sam was officially diagnosed with it at three years old. How anyone could look at a toddler with big, puppy-dog eyes wearing fuzzy green dinosaur footsie pajamas and deem him as a "dangerous creature" was _beyond_ me.

_Dangerous, my ass_. If you ever met the kid, you'd know what I mean. He's got messy brown hair that always is flopping over his eyes, a little ski-slope nose, gangly limbs he hasn't really quite grown into even now. I mean, my kid brother will have one beer and be pretty much hammered. He likes to pick arguments about grammar when he's drunk, too. See where I'm going with this?

Yet Astral Projectors have a stigma, and a pretty bad one at that. Even young kids on playgrounds create vague ideas about what one would look like; shifty-eyed people in perfectly pressed suits with inhuman smiles who work for the "bad guys". Their expertise would be weaseling and burrowing their way into people's minds like squirming rats. Regular people believe that Projectors can manipulate emotions, drive people crazy, assassinate people, the like.

Kids could come up with some crazy shit. Unfortunately, adult's beliefs weren't much different.

And it was dangerous to be one, especially as an adult. None of them usually made it to adulthood before they'd be taken away- but by who or what, no one actually knows. Just one day- _poof_, and they're gone. I'll admit, all this running away was pretty tiresome.

I thought back to the man I'd caught and let go of tonight.

I remembered his eyes the most. They were such a faded grey-blue color they almost looked like a drowned person's. Or maybe like all the color had simply drained away from the bottoms of them, leaving only a faint blue stain. I'd never seen such a corpse-like color on a living person before.

And there had just been something about him. Sure, he'd had that stick-up-his-ass look all the churchfolk pricks had, perfectly pressed clothes without even a speck of lint and neatly combed hair with each strand in perfect place. It had to be something in those unbelievably light eyes, just..._something_. Maybe it had been that second of hesitation: his lips had parted as if he wanted to say something else, but then they'd stubbornly pressed back together and his eyes had flicked over to the side in defiance, not looking at me anymore.

I can't place why I noticed these things. He'd said all the same warm-and-fuzzy things as the other men, like "_you and your kind are inhuman abominations" _or, one of my favorites, "_you're as close to a demon a human can physically get."_Wow, I haven't heard _those_ before.

He'd known a lot less than I'd assumed, thinking I was one.

_You'll burn in hell for siding with those creatures,_was the next thing he'd hissed with a mouthful of 'd pulled that phrase out of his ass after he'd been proved wrong, when he found out I wasn't a Projector. Castiel's voice had grown guttural from the pressure of my pretty little switchblade pressed up on his throat, and his response had been weak and so rehearsed.

Well, if I'm going to hell for siding with these people, so be it. It would be too hard to try to aim to be some kind of "hero" by this society's standards anyway, and I would rather be stabbed in the asscheek with a dull knife then be looked up upon by these people, when the ideal human being is a blind sheep to the Church, and an even _more_ ideal human are those who would do anything for the Church, like Mr. Stick-Up-His-Ass. Hell, I still couldn't believe I'd let him go.

This world wasn't exactly cut out for people like us. So, we carved and clawed out our own place. My brother and I and a couple of other Projectors now live on the road, just trying to scrape by with the money we make from our faked exorcisms.

_Okay_.

Well, I'll admit, that does sound weird jumping to conclusions there with no context. I'll have to get back to you on that one.

I stuck my stinging hands into the big front pocket of my hoodie and sighed when I saw that the small yellow bulb that sat just above the edge of the camper's door was still lit, despite the fact that it was almost five in the morning, and I'd left around two. Someone inside must have awoken and noticed I was gone in the middle of the night.

The keys jingled faintly as I fished them out of my back pocket, but before I could unlock the door it swung open. My little brother met my eyes, his expression was extremely unamused and he looked a thousand times more tired in the dim yellow light of the single bare bulb.

"You had me worried sick." Sam frowned and crossed his arms over his chest.

"Well, I'm here now." I replied wearily and tried to muster up a smile. He snorted. That was _definitely_ my worst excuse yet.

He took my wrist and raised an eyebrow. _Dammit_. I still had a little bit of blood darkening the small crescents of my short fingernails. My knuckles were a swollen, puffy pink and the small splits were still a raw red.

"It's nothing." I tried to brush it off. "I...um, dropped something on 'em earlier today." He wasn't supposed to know what I'd done, well, not _exactly_. All he was supposed to know was if we had a tail, I got rid of it. He didn't have to know the specifics. I didn't _want _him to know the specifics.

"Yeah, right." Sam snorted. He let my arm go, and it plopped down onto my thigh. Sam raised his eyebrows and gave me that smug shit-eating sibling smirk that usually ended with a mother prying two kids apart. "Tell me, was it that guy I've been checking up on? Brother, uh, whatizname...Castiel?"

"Fine," I answered, then avoided his eyes and crossed my arms. I hated talking about this. "Yes, it was."

He didn't quite seem to know how to reply. I bit on my lower lip. What I had to do to protect him, to protect everyone else I was living with- it was the biggest, brightest, neon-flashing elephant in the room.

"Did you rebind for the night?" I asked, trying to avoid the subject and meeting his eyes again. If he waited too long after waking up, his soul would reseal to his body, so he wouldn't be able to get back to sleep until the next night. See, Projectors had to find out these kinds of things for themselves.

"Not yet." Sam said softly, rubbing the bottom of his nose. "I've been waiting for you to come back for around….an hour and a half, now."

"Wanna go for a beer?" I asked, trying to give him the best warm smile I could come up with, considering my current circumstances.

"Hm. Fine." His sighed and ran a hand down his face. "But don't fucking scare me like that again, Dean." He mumbled grumpily and moved to the side of the doorframe to finally let me in.

I opened up our mini fridge and fished two beers out of the fridge for us. Sam reached up to the small roost of the camper and tugged his blanket down.

I tried not to look at Levi as I got the drinks. His caramel-colored eyes were wide open and they tracked my movements as he snored. One of his eyes was fully dilated, a wide black hole, and the other a normal, friendly brown. _Poor Levi, _I thought, but still didn't want to get much nearer as his off-balance glazed eyes peered out at me from the shadows. Not like I was afraid of him- we'd been friends since preschool. I just had to convince myself that he wasn't awake, but it was kind of hard when it looked like he was staring right at me.

I unlatched the door to the outside and carried two green-bottled beers in one hand, I swung open the door and stepped outside into the dark and Sam followed, hiking up his blanket.

We both swung around to the back and scaled the silver pool-like ladder that lead up to the roof of the camper, the bulky A/C boxes and the skylight leaving just a small flat space for us to sit on top. Sam grumbled about sacrificing his blanket for us to sit on instead of the cold, dewy metal, but did it anyway.

I twisted off the top of a beer, which I handed to Sam first. He took it by the glass neck and waited for me to open mine too before he took the first sip; an unspoken rule.

"So, we got another job tomorrow, then?" Sam asked, and the bitter taste of beer and the little kick of the bubbles burned down my throat at the first sip. I nodded.

I looked out at the scenery; tall telephone poles with lamp heads sticking out of them lead a straight line all the way down the road, getting successively smaller until their amber-yellow glows were out of sight, and to the right was just a dark field, and beyond that lumpy, dark shapes of the clouds in the distance. It looked like it might storm later.

"I just..." Sam paused and I tried to read his expression, it was hard to make out in the dark, but he was looking off into the distance as well and he seemed troubled by the little wrinkle that was forming between his eyebrows. "Do you think they're getting closer to finding us out 'cause of how many jobs we're taking on nowadays?"

I took a small sip of beer before answering. "No. They're not any closer to catching us than when we first started, Sammy." I rubbed my ridge of swelling knuckles once again. "Not if I have anything to do with it." I explained wearily, my beer hanging limply between my legs as I rested my arm on my thigh, my feet perched on the short guardrail of the van.

"Yeah," Sam replied. "I guess not, then."

I looked down the dark hole leading into the neck of the bottle and watched a few yellowish fizzy bubbles climb up from inside.

"Sometimes I wish I could go home." Sam admitted after a moment, setting his beer to the side and hugging his knees up to his chest.

"Yeah, me too." I spoke up again. "But Dad found new wife, step kids, hell, even that new kid." Another sip. "He doesn't worry about us." I lied through my teeth. I knew he'd want us back home more than anything, but I didn't want my brother to know that.

"How do you know?" Sam asked, meeting my eyes and frowning.

"He probably worried at first about us. But he doesn't care anymore, Sam. He has a new life now, one we're not a part of and it should stay that way." I said, and regretted I'd let that much bitterness show in my voice.

"I guess it's just us two then, big brother." Sam looked at something in the distance and folded his eyes closed. There was a beat of heavy silence, and I looked out at the darkened field and took another bitter sip.

Sure, it's been tougher than a normal life on the road. I miss getting to have a shower whenever I wanted to, and being able to actually stand up after getting out of bed, and having, y'know, _milk _with my cereal, but I've gotten used to all these things. I don't hate anything in my life right now, not really. We just watched the dark sky in silence for a moment, the crickets' staccato trilling coming from the field to the right were pleasant bursts of sound in the night.

And I realized that we were just two tiny, tiny people in this great, big, awful world.

I sat back with my palms behind me and leaned into my arms, tipping my head back to look at the velvety black sky with the pinpricks of brittle stars. Sam still hadn't finished his beer, and he took a little sip and tipped his head back too.

"You ever wish we lived in the Before?" Sam asked softly. That was unexpected.

I laughed a little. "Oh, just 'cause it's late doesn't mean I want to get all philosophical too, Sam. That's one difference between us. You have a beer, you get philosophical. I have a beer and I just want to talk about cute chicks."

"Or did you mean chicks you've banged? 'Cause that pie chart doesn't cross," Sam snorted, and I playfully swiped at the back of his head.

"Bitch," I grumbled. He threw his head back and laughed, showcasing his back molars like he usually does.

"Hey, the 'people I've banged' circle isn't gonna cross with _any_ pie chart, wiseass." I rolled my eyes and chuckled. "Hm. _Pie_. Now _that_ I could go for."

Sam let out a small huff of a laugh and tipped back another sip of beer. "Yeah, yeah. You've told me a thousand times." He grinned around the green lip of the bottle. I'm glad he came up here with me to talk. I hadn't been feeling so great about my decisions for the night.

"Seriously, though." Sam still had his neck craned to look at the stars. "I wonder what it would be like to live back in A.D.?"

"We're not little kids anymore, Sam, it's been years since we played this game." I said, but I humored him, and he knew it.

"But that was the ridiculous kiddie stuff. Sailing in the Niña, building the Great Wall of China, looting with Pirates. I mean what was it _really _like, Dean?"

I was born in 319 A.M., Anno Metere, or the Year of the Reaping. Three hundred and forty-three years ago was when Hell opened up on Earth, and the fields of humanity were finally harvested. The humans God considered to be good, his wheat, went with him, and the weeds, the darnel, stayed on Earth. He'd promised he'd never commit a mass genocide ever again like the time of Noah's arc, but hell, this whole "abandonment" idea as opposed to murder wasn't much of a better strategy, either.

These weeds stayed and were ripped apart by the Hellcreatures and everything was chaos and death and every man for himself. Until the Church became the only thing people could turn to, and it built itself back again from the ground up. Too bad the new foundation was _damn_ crooked. People flocked for security, for protection, for some kind of certainty in the Hell the Earth had become.

And here I am in the aftermath three hundred years later, the result of generations of the people who had been left behind by God, who hadn't been good enough for him to take. Bet that makes me look like an awful good person, doesn't it?

"Don't you ever wonder what it was like?" Sam prompted again.

"Sometimes. But it doesn't matter. It's not like we go back," I concluded somewhat moodily and tipped the very last sip of beer into my mouth and set the bottle down again on the hood with a clink.

"But people have tried to make things better! What if we had _science_, Dean, and we didn't have to heal all these people pretending to be something we're not! What if-" Sam was getting all worked up again.

"Enough," I interrupted him gruffly. I brought my hands up to my temples and massaged in slow circles. "Things are how they are, Sam. We're just four people in a great big bad world. We're doing _something_, that's all that matters."

"Do you think we're all still darnel and tares?" Sam asked in a whisper, and he knew I'd catch onto what he meant after all my years spent Training. Funny he should ask me that, but we seemed to think along the same lines pretty often.

Not much had changed since 0 AM, well, societal-wise. The people, however, the darnel-people who hadn't been good enough to harvest...

Even Jesus was related to Cain, wasn't he? Even the Son of God was related to the Father of Murder. And after three hundred years, after all these generations, we couldn't _all _be bad still. Right? But we couldn't be the pure and good people he'd taken in the first place, either. We had to be something of a different breed by now.

"...No," I answered him carefully after a second of thought, wetting my lips with a sweep of my tongue. "But we sure as hell aren't wheat anymore either."

And with that, I slipped back and began to climb back down from the roof. Sam didn't follow me right away, the door to the van squealed open, and I sighed. I didn't want to go back inside without him, so I just waited.

Honestly, I didn't know what God's plan was for us anymore, "us" being his abandoned people. I don't know if He really knows His plan either, as crazy as that sounds.

"You're heading back in already?" Sam called out to me, peering over the edge of the van. He looked like a little owl with his messy brown hair and his hands perched on the railing and I didn't even try to fight back my laugh this time.

"Yeah, I'm heading back to bed." I told him, craning my neck to look up at him.

He looked back out to the empty field and the black tree line like billows of clouds, and a cool night breeze brushed my cheeks. I sometimes wonder what my brother thought about in times like these.

"You coming, Sammy?" I asked with a little chuckle after a moment of silence. "Or sleeping out there? 'Cause I'll lock you out. "

He rolled his eyes. "I'm coming." He tipped the rest of his beer, which was probably just bubbles and backwash, into his mouth and clambered off the roof as well with those ridiculously lanky limbs, going slightly slower as he carried the bunched-up blanket. It must have been much later than I thought, because I swore I saw just the beginning of dawn glowing on the horizon.

"I'm sorry I got frustrated with you." I told Sam as I laid back down on my futon in the camper's roost and pulled all the blankets over me. "The AD game used to be fun, you know. And as we got older-"

"-just friggin' depressing." Sam interrupted with a small grin.

I chuckled and bumped my shoulder to his. "Exactly."

I climbed the slightly squeaky ladder and slipped under the covers. Sleep weighed heavy on me almost immediately.

"Are you tired?" Sam asked in a hushed voice beside me.

"Hmm. Little bit." I yawned and buried my face into his fluff of pillows. Hopefully that would send him the message. _Not everyone has a fancy-schmancy soul that reseals like yours, Sam._ I thought with a tiny smile that I hid under the top of my blanket.

"Can you tell me what demons are like? What you saw in those Exorcisms you helped with?" Sam asked softly. "You've never really told me about them before."

"Well, you've never asked." My voice was muffled as I spoke up and finally turned to face him. "But you don't want to have any more nightmares than you already have, Sam, trust me." I raised an eyebrow at him, even though he probably could barely see me in the dim, amber light that filtered through from the streetlamp above us.

"Do they really have black eyes and speak in a low multivoice?" Sam scooted over and poked my shoulder. "What about the...you know, smoke? Or maybe spaded tails? Or _claws_? Or.."

"Jesus, Sam, the answer is _no _to all of those." I chuckled. "I thought you knew a little better than that, at least." I peeped one eye over the covers at him. "Tell you the truth, it's just...well, nothing."

"Nothing?" Sam parroted, his voice quiet in disbelief.

"Yeah, Sammy, nothing. Just like you can't really see who has a mental illness from the outside. I mean, possessed people act different, but the demons, the spirits...just, _nothing_. Or they're invisible to us humans, at least." I contemplated saying this next part, but to hell with it.

"-Kind of like your soul." I spoke up again. "Have you ever seen it? Or seen other people's, like Kara's coming back to her body or Levi's floating around?"

"I..I haven't." He whispered. There was a small beat of silence. "Holy crap, that's terrifying."

"I guess so." I replied. "Invisible is almost scarier than claws and spaded tails and black eyes, huh?" I teased, peeping my eye open again to see his expression. He looked troubled.

"I don't really know." Sam replied, deep in thought, and he reached for a book he kept next to his bed. "...So, _nothing_, huh?" He took a little page-clip flashlight that hung over the page like an angler fish's bait and clicked it on.

"Are you using that- you're such a _nerd_." I laughed when I heard that tiny click and took a corner of his blankets and rolled over so that my back was to him. I'd given him that reading light as a gift during his senior year of high school since he loved his schoolwork. I didn't know he'd kept that crappy thing this whole time, much less bring it with the few belongings he could onto this tiny camper.

"Good_night_, Dean." Sam fake snapped at me and started reading, trying to hide his smile.

The birds began to wake up and chirp and make a racket from a mass of trees nearby, I heard Levi's quiet scraping of handcuffs on a metal pole from downladder, and I thought about the four of us on some abandoned road in the middle of nowhere all snug in this crappy camper, off to help the next guy...

"Y'know, dandelions are weeds too." Sam said softly, and something about his voice told me he was smiling. He flipped a page with a papery rustle. "And I think they're wonderful."


	2. Chapter 2

I woke up slowly, my mind readjusting to the tiny space of the high-top in the camper from the strange, hazy dream I'd just had.

Rain.

It must have started a little after dawn. The world seemed to feel smaller with all this white noise surrounding me. I blinked at the rounded ceiling about an arm's length above me, alive with pattering noises. (I know, I've got quite the glamorous life going here. You don't have to tell me twice.) But at least these down comforters had never felt so cozy.

Sam made a small whine beside me in his sleep, and I turned my gaze to him instead of the ceiling. Sam rarely ever looked at peace when he slept. Now, his eyebrows were drawn together so that a little wrinkle formed between them, and the slight domes of his corneas darted back and forth from under the thin skin of his eyelids. He made another small, scared noise.

"Hey. Sam. Wake up." I yawned, reached over and gave him a few (okay, I'll admit they might have been just a smidgen above gentle) slaps on the cheek. "C'mon, Sammy. Come on back now."

Sam moaned in annoyance, his eyelashes fluttering for a second before his eyes folded open slightly. He squinted at me, looking like some kind of disheveled bird. His messy brown hair was ruffled and flopping all over the place, and I had to force back the urge to laugh.

"Shit, it got _cold_." Sam fumbled for a sweater, an old ratty one for a university he'd never be able to go to and pulled it on. It was only when he turned to look at me that I noticed his pupils were blown wide into deep black holes.

"Oh," I uttered and pinched his cheeks in one of my hands to examine him, it made him look like a little puckering fish with his lips squished like that.

"_Whaff_?" Sam attempted to say, annoyed and grouchy from being woken up so abruptly. He shoved my arm away and crossed his over his chest.

I examined those thin green-blue rings around wide, black pupils once again and frowned as disapprovingly as I could manage at him. Sam groaned, his dilated eyes rolling in annoyance. He turned over back onto the small rectangular cushioned mat he called a bed and stuffed a pillow over his rat nest of hair.

"Sam, I _thought_ you knew how to stay in by now." I scolded him lightly. "You always seem so shaken up when you Project-"

"Yeah, well, I can slip up sometimes, okay?" Sam interrupted, an embarrassed flush on his cheeks as he sat up and attempted to smooth down his bedhead. "It's _difficult_, Dean." He muttered.

I tugged at a corner of the fitted sheets that had come undone and tucked it under the corner of the tiny futon-like mat I'd slept on, until the texture smoothed out like an unpainted canvas. I shivered and pulled a raggedy old Mexican blanket over my feet. The rain was coming down pretty hard now, and this crappy old camper ain't exactly airtight.

"What did you see this time?" I asked Sam, trying my best not to be insensitive. Sam hugged his knees up to his chest, and suddenly he looked six again.

"Don't wanna talk about it." Sam pulled a mass of his wrinkled blankets and pastel quilts to pool onto his lap. I didn't know if Sam was lying to me about slipping up, or if he was sneaking around doing something he doesn't want me to know about. "I definitely didn't want to see that one." Sam tacked on in a much smaller voice, mumbling.

"That bad, huh?" I asked, suddenly feeling guilty for doubting even for a second that he'd lie to me about his Projecting. I knew he'd never do that.

He hummed and ran a hand through his messy hair. "I'll be all right, Dean. You don't have to worry so much about what happens to me when I Project, okay? I promise, I'm okay."

"All right," I finally agreed, nodding a little, picking at a loose thread of the blanket on my lap. I didn't mean to give him a hard time, I just _worried_.

_In a world infested with demons and spirits, I would think someone with a spirit that can detach from their body would be the **least** of anyone's problems._I thought to myself, and bitter and tight feeling swirled deep in my stomach.

Being the only "normal" one in this camper full of projectors, well, it was...unique. But it's not like I was complaining. I'd way rather stay inside the comfort of my own head at night instead of be flung into the depths of the minds of God-knows-who. And after seeing how hard things are on my brother, I'd settle for boring ol' human any day.

_They're barely even treated as human,_I thought, and that bitter feeling from the bottom of my stomach returned, surging through me like a strong wave. I pushed the wrinkled mass of blankets away from my lap.

"I'll go get Lev." I yawned. "You can sit up here and rest, if you want. Far journey?"

"Yup," Sam replied, rubbing his face groggily and lying back down. "Five more minutes?" He huffed.

"Take twenty," I waved the comment away, and he chuckled a little before rolling back over and burrowing into his covers. I playfully squeezed his exposed foot and he was able to kick my leg pretty hard in retaliation. I turned around, taking the short ladder from our little roost of two beds located in the camper's high top down to the tiny, cramped cabin below.

I snatched up the little silver key from a counter that was messy with wayward files, their papery contents smeared across the entire countertop, and turned around to release my friend.

The lanky guy with long copper hair falling around his cheeks was slumped on one of the couches lining the edge of the camper. He was sleeping with his bunched-up purple comforter and was snoring contently with one full-sleeve tattooed arm hanging limply above his head. This arm was linked to a pipe that had been welded onto the wall of the car by yours truly, attached with a pair of steel handcuffs. I noted that the piece of piping looked worn down, like it had been worked and scraped at for hours upon hours. We should probably replace that soon.

"Morning," Levi yawned when he saw me, his caramel-brown eyes darted around the car to check his surroundings, to make sure he really was where he was when he fell asleep last night. He yawned again, bringing his big palm up to his mouth to cover it. "What's the plan for today, Dean?"

"We're trying to make it to Kansas by sundown. And while we're there…" I mumbled and reached over to unlock his handcuff. I guess anyone _could_ get the key he'd toss onto the counter each night after locking himself up, but it somehow just wound up being my 'job' after a while. Not that I minded it. It was a very small inconvenience compared to the risk of him sleepwalking right out of the camper.

"I know, I know. Mom's house, gotta go through her _inheritance _to me." Levi rubbed his inked wrist for a second, then ran his pale fingers through his long hair, creating little indented troughs in the faded ginger-brown. He collected it all into a small wolftail, though a few thin strands fell out in front of his ears and over his copper sideburns. "It's probably just going to be some dusty old hexbags and voodoo dolls and moldy old books." He absent-mindedly ran his thumb along a pink line on back of his wrist from the rubbing of the handcuff.

"It won't be that bad, Lev." I tried to reassure him with a small smile, sitting down on the edge of the red seat of our tiny dining booth, I folded my arms along the backrest and rested my chin on top of them. "Maybe we could use some of that stuff to sell the show a little more."

Levi huffed a small laugh, glanced over at me and spoke muffedly through the fabric as he pulled on a dark blue cotton tee. "Yeah, well, we'll see."

My eyes wandered the rest of the interior of the camper. There was a bright red electric lantern hanging above the tiny chrome sink in the corner with the peeling white mini fridge underneath, and I noted our paperwork was a hell of a mess and files were strewn everywhere. We had to stop by the Laundromat soon too, I made a mental note, our white plastic laundry basket was spilling over with wrinkled lumps of multicolored cloth. But that was my job, always checking on things, always evaluating what we had to do next.

The raven-haired Kara still slept bundled up in a green plaid tartan on the couch opposite to Levi's. We both let her sleep. Projectors never really get enough of it.

"Gonna go whip up something to eat," Levi mumbled groggily, rubbing his slightly pink wrist once more before throwing off his blankets.

"Dean?" I heard Sam's muffled voice call from the bed roost. "Can you get me a water?"

"Yeah," I called back, standing up and making my way to the mini fridge as Levi rattled a box of cereal into a plastic bowl, the hushing and clinking noises filled the air. I flexed my hands and my scabby knuckles throbbed a little more.

"Hey, we got any milk?" Levi asked, searching through our mini fridge.

"Nope," I reached around him took out bottled water for Sam. "It spoiled last week, remember?"

"Oh, yeah." Levi replied and shut the door with a slight suctioning sound and hopped up on the counter and crossed his ankles.

"And we rarely actually get that stuff, anyway." I said, laughing. He always asked this question. "We've been trying to stick with non-perishables, remember?"

"Hey, a guy can hope." Levi laughed and stuck a spoonful of dry cereal into his mouth and waggled his eyebrows at me.

"Amen." I lifted the water bottle as if saying 'cheers' and Levi laughed.

"The fact you still have the nerve to say 'Amen', Mr. Ex-Priest." Levi pointed at me with the end of his spoon. "We got some fucked up lives, y'know that?"

"Trust me, I know." I called back to him over my shoulder as I climbed up the rungs to my and Sam's sleeping space. I teased him by slipping the bottle into a small opening by Sam's head, a tuft of his brown hair was the only thing sticking out of a burrito of blankets, and he groaned as it slipped down inside.

"Cold!" Sam shrieked and kicked. "_Gah_-DEAN!"


	3. Chapter 3

"Hey, feet off the files." I snorted and motioned for Levi to put his bare feet down off of our messy documents, the tatted guy was sitting on the counter in the tiny kitchen. He grumbled a little but moved his feet to a bare spot on the counter.

"Ah, shit..." I cursed under my breath when I saw raindrops from a leak in the ceiling pattering onto a nearby manila folder. "Lev, hand me a bowl, wouldja?"

"Just wake up Kara." Levi muttered as he swung open a tiny storage unit and handed me a plastic bowl and stuck another spoonful of dry cereal into his mouth. "She'll patch up a leak like you wouldn't even believe."

"I really shouldn't." I slipped the bowl under the dripping water, which beat on steadily in cartoonish _ker-plunks_. "Last weeks 'exorcism' took a lot out of her."

"Ah. Yeah." Levi said as if he'd only just remembered, and brushed some flyaway hairs from his face and took another crunchy bite of dry cereal. "That was a toughie. A deep-rooted one, too. It took a little more yanking than usual to get it out." He spoke muffledly around the food chipmunked in his cheeks.

Oh, yeah. The fake exorcisms. I _did_ promise I would get back to that, didn't I?

This may come as a shock to you. It comes as a shock for everyone in this godforsaken world. Believe it or not, demons and the occasional malevolent spirit aren't the only threats out there.

Yeah, I know. Take your time. I didn't know either, until just about two years ago. In case you're wondering, that's also the reason why all these scuzzy churchfolk are always tailing our asses. They don't want people to know there's things out there they simply can't fix, that there are things beyond the Church's reach, and they want people to follow them with blind faith. And, unfortunately, I had been one of those people.

See, I had been training to become a Priest.

_And look just how the fuck that one turned out,_I thought with a tiny smile tugging at the corner of my lips, and I was suddenly made very aware of the dull throb of my split knuckles again. Ever since Dad forced me into that awful training program to compensate for a child people practically deemed as an anti-Christ, I had absolutely _abhorred _it. But my dad had said the family name was "unholy" ever since little Sammy had entered the world, and "we" needed to set things right. It was like Sam was a black sheep, the stain on the family name, and my Training got us the bleach to try and make things better. Next-to-normal.

That's how Dad saw it, anyway.

Just thinking about all the shit Sam had gone through as a kid always made my blood run hot. The little boy had had more holy water flicked in his face and enough Latin spat at him that he could have recreated the rituals himself by the age of eight. I remembered the fear in his eyes, eyelids flown wide, his round face pale and his tiny ribcage squeezing in and out with panicked breaths, and I had to stop and shove that thought right from my mind.

I stayed in training for almost ten years. I had hated every second of it.

I've seen real malevolent spirits and real monsters and real demons, but they were rare. It had been much worse three hundred years ago when they'd first swarmed by the thousands when the pits of Hell had officially opened for business. Nowadays their numbers were dwindling, these creatures were only lingering remnants of those days long ago.

So when it wasn't any kind of demon or Hellcreature the Church knew of, many times they'd said a condition could not be cured, gave their 'deepest condolences', told those suffering to always have faith, and they were on their merry way. See, this was when I really began to grow suspicious that there had to be something else, something haunting these people. It just couldn't be _nothing_, right?

The local library was short of science books. This entire damned _planet _was short of science books. Sure, the library had a few things on Earth's crust and the water cycle and crap, but it wasn't what I had needed by a long shot.

Sam used to always tell me about his dreams, because I was the only one in our family he trusted. And when I really looked for them, I noticed a reoccurring pattern in my brother's nightmares. That led to my harsh realization; there were things _inside _people's minds, not a possession or any kind of foreign influence.

It was a monster that was self-generated, an invisible demon created from a chemical upset in the mind. A mental illness. A thing that only the rare astral projector like Sam or Levi or Kara could see in manifestations, and a creature that only they could end for good so quickly.

I turned away from the Church to _really _cure people, because in this world it is accepted to believe in magic and miracles instead of science and medicine, where demon possessions were real and mental illnesses the fables.

_Because "Enlightenment" and "Armageddon" are practically synonymous, aren't they?_ I thought bitterly and my hands balled into fists, and I bit down on my jaw. It was better to not spend so much time thinking about it.

I've never experienced an M.I. firsthand, like I said, I'm not a Projector. Sam described to me that Depression was usually right up there with the nastiest monsters the three of them took care of. It was just downright a disgusting creature: deep and as pure dark as a blob of Mars Black acrylic, burrowing deep down and rooting itself in the mind like a malevolent weed. Sam had told me it was drippy and messy, splattering viscous black mucus like tar wherever it went. It was faceless too, with hundreds of twisted root-like arms that could cling onto anything and wrap tight like veins, and it was _heavy_. Just one drip of that stuff felt like it weighed thirty pounds.

Levi said he personally hated Anxiety: the monster would fill up a space so completely it would be cramped and uncomfortable and he'd be trapped in some kind of confined space with his forehead pressed up right to the ceiling and just an inch of space to breath as a liquid blackness would be rising higher and higher past his chin and his mouth and leaving barely enough space to get air even from his nostrils. A state of pure, unadulterated panic.

Kara's least favorite was OCD, the patterns and the rhythms and the pure deep-rooted need to repeat. There was always the favorite number, and the good and the evil numbers, and the good colors and bad colors and the angle required that made sure it was just irrevocably right and, the creeping heavy paranoia of _are you SURE you've checked? _It made her head spin and she'd always be violently ill after curing a person with it.

Once again, I was pretty glad I'm not a Projector. Just the description of the things they told me they'd come out of were worse than any demon or spirit I've ever encountered in real life. Sometimes I do wish I could do more to help, though. But I do what I can.

The Church had very quickly gone sour for me, if that isn't obvious enough. It was funny how things seemed to fall into place after that. Levi had wanted to run away from home since he'd been out of Elementary school, and I'd always agreed that I would go with him no matter what as we spent hours fixing up this old camper in the garage after school. Sam had wanted to go to college, but it just wasn't an option for him. The three of us pretty much hit the road while the kid was still wearing his senior black high school graduation robes and cap.

And with all those years of training for a practice that I'd never use again, fake exorcisms were the only thing that made sense. We'd help those who'd been given up on, labeling ourselves as "Specialists". We'd put on a whole show as Exorcists to cure these people from the inside out. I knew the whole damn ritual like the back of my hand, anyway.

Well, everything seemed to make sense to me. But it turns out what I originally thought was a good idea kind of wound up making the church even more bloodthirsty to see that my brother and I were safe and sound six feet under. At least, I _think_ they'd kill us. The Projectors who were stolen away from their homes or jobs- no one ever heard from them again. The Church had a system set up in their favor, devout followers who would never question any of the bad things that went on around here, and they'd fight to the death against a breeze that would topple their house of cards.

_The last thing I ever did was steal a few suits from those bastards,_I thought. And, like always, I asked myself; would I rather be stuck in a leaky, chilled camper on a rainy morning with three 'human abominations' then be pretending to exorcise yet _another _person with a very blatant case of paranoia?

Absolutely.

I plopped down next to Sam on the bottom step of the two stairs leading into the camper, we remained dry in the very small square provided under the protection of the canvas awning.

"You doing all right?" I asked. Kara and Levi had been arguing about the best way to fix that leak in the ceiling for the past half hour now and I was definitely feeling the cabin fever.

From behind, Sam was a hunched human-like figure, the green-and-blue plaid tartan hooded over his hair and he had another fuzzy yellow blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He looked like a friggin' babushka with all those blankets wrapped around him and I fought back the urge to laugh. Why in the hell he needed _this_ many blankets in the middle of summer was anyone's guess.

Sam huffed out a breath of air and his eyes slid over to glance at me. His eyes always held a kind of childish light behind them, even though Sam was nineteen and verging on twenty now. I chuckled a little at that expectant look. He knew me all too well. I handed him what I'd brought for him, tea in a cheap paper cup, holding onto the sides like a claw machine. Sam graciously curled his fingers around the middle, hoping to warm his palms.

"Yeah, I'm all right." Sam replied simply, taking a hesitant sip of the tea and making sure to avoid the floating teabag with his lips. "Thanks for asking."

"You're always allowed in my dreams if you...uh, slip up again, you know." I said.

"Well, I can't- I don't want to make you-" Sam started but interrupted himself. "Never mind," He mumbled, shaking his head. "You just don't get it."

I didn't quite know how to respond. Of course I didn't understand it, I couldn't even begin to try. And sometimes that frustrated the hell out of me.

"Yeah. I guess we'll just forget it." I agreed with a huff. Sam was nowhere near as good as Kara or Levi were at Projecting, he was still learning. I have no idea how hard it all was for him, so I didn't push the subject.

We watched the dirty puddles in the worn-down road boil with raindrops for a moment in comfortable silence. It was then that I noticed Sam was shaking, his yellow tea rippling in tiny waves as his hand trembled. He sure wasn't shivering; it was a warm, April shower and he _was_ wearing all these ridiculous blankets. I rubbed my open palm in a few broad circles on his hunched back, and his eyelids slipped closed exhaustedly.

"Just relax." I said in a softer tone. "You'll be fine. It wasn't real."

"Remember Mr. Cohen?" Sam asked quietly. Mr. Cohen had been someone we'd both known as kids, and he'd later been executed for murdering his wife and daughter with a piece of iron piping. Needless to say, he'd been a Grade A Lunatic. "This person was kind of like that. I don't know who she was, but it was, uh, it was fucked up."

Sam would get into people's minds, see some bad shit and those things would stick with him. He'd..._observe_. Not the other word. Not that awful, despicable p-word. (He had been a five-year-old with a wandering soul, goddammit, he wasn't _possessing_ people. Fuck the priest who had said that to him so long ago, damn him for planting that idea.)

"You're not-" I began, only to have him interrupt me by putting up a palm.

"I know, I know," He began, bobbing his head from side to side. "I'm not "posessing" people. You always say that." He even brought his fingers up for air quotes.

"Well, I'll keep saying that until you believe me." I smirked at him and he let out a little huff of a laugh, rolling his eyes and running his fingers through his flop of hair.

"You're annoying," Sam chuckled, closing his lips around the cusp of the paper cup once again.

My heart gave a strange, fierce pump in my chest. I felt all my irritation at my brother just melt away, and I looked to see him taking another careful sip of the hot tea. The tea brushed small curls of vapor against his cheeks before vanishing. His dark brown hair was fluffier and drier than normal from its battle this morning with a comb. _He's a damn good brother, Sam. I'd never want a different one._

I looped my arms around my knees and rested my chin on the hard bone on one of them. "You're feeling up for today's gig, right? I mean, you-" I began.

"I'll be fine," Sam mustered a half-hearted smile, shrugging slightly. "Really."

"Sounds good." I watched a dirty puddle a few feet away, the surface rippling with dozens of transient circles. "How're the salt stockpiles?" I asked.

"Low." Sam replied with a chuckle. "God, it's getting expensive. Can't we just start drawing sigils instead? It's all for damn show anyway."

"Spray paint's expensive too. And come on, you really think they'll give us a bonus if we ruin the hardwood?" I asked, raising an eyebrow in a way I knew made the perfect arch.

"It's all about the bonuses," Sam laughed, his eyes crinkling up at the corners and closing slightly into little twin crescents. He raised his tea a little as if saying 'cheers' and took a more gratuitous sip now that it had started cooling down. That was more like the brother I knew. The tea bag twirled and fluttered in the wind like a tiny white moth.

"Amen to that," I agreed with a chuckle. I could say we did all this; running from the church then going and impersonating them, curing people from the inside out, and living in this crappy camper out of the goodness of our hearts, but hey, these bonuses and money sure didn't _hurt _the cause. And we really did need all of it if we wanted to keep pulling this off.

"You really gotta quit saying 'Amen' to stuff, dude." Sam chuckled.

I playfully pushed his head sideways a little and stood up, letting out a little groan as I stretched my arms skyward, then folded my elbows above my head and reached down toward my shoulder blades. I could just imagine Levi and Sammy's taller-than-six-foot struggle living out of this cramped thing. I was just about two inches shy of six feet tall, but I was pretty much "short" compared to my lanky monster of a brother and towering friend. I mean, c'mon, five foot ten is _not_ that short. It just wasn't fair, that's what it was.

A tiny bit of my lower belly peeped out from over the top of my pants, flashing a small dark blonde happy trial and a large, deep purple stain of a bruise with sickly yellow and grey above the square of my hipbone.

Ah, damn. That must have been from when Castiel had gotten a couple kicks on me the other night before I'd restrained him.

A fighter, that one. Most of those churchmembers did some pathetic little squirming routine for a minute tops before giving up. This guy, he'd just _kicked_ like a goddamn wild buck. And made his mark, too.

Sam poked at the bruise without reservations, like a curious little kid.

"Um, _ow_." I scowled and quickly tugged my shirt back down my hips. "You're such a dick."

"Dumbass," Sam said, but it was clear he was concerned, his eyebrows drawing together and forming a little wrinkle between them.

"What can I say, I'm a scrappy guy." I shot Sam a shit-eating grin.

"You're a goddamn dumbass, that's what." Sam scoffed, but his lips pulled into an involuntary smile. He knew I was getting a kick out of him being worried about me for once.

"Tell Kara and Levi to stop tearing at each other's throats and hit the road. We have to leave soon if we want to make it there before sunset." Sam stood up and turned to go back inside the door.

"And we have to buy some more salt." I pointed out, beginning to step back inside after him.

"Damn salt." Sam chuckled again and shook his head slightly back and forth, smiling at the ground. "It's just a waste. Do you ever think about how many things you could _bake _with that?"


	4. Chapter 4

Hi there everybody! Thank you for reviewing, favoriting/following, or even just reading :) I know its been a long time since I've been continuously posting on this website but I'm hoping to start it all up again!

On a side note, I don't know why but I felt like 4 characters would be enough to be classified as a "team", so you'll be learning more about Levi and Kara's history a little bit along the way as well. And don't worry- Cas will be coming in a little bit later and become much more important to the story. Other little things about my plans for this- the characters will change and grow. Sam is still very young here, 19, and still very much a child. He will be changing gradually and "aging" as he's forced to make some tough decisions. Also, I actually don't have _that_ much of this pre-written. I'll let you guys know when I am forced to begin from scratch!

Thanks so much for all your support everyone :) And I'll just shut up now.

* * *

><p>The white camper van finally pulled to a stop, popping slightly along the gravel to the side of the road. We were now overlooking an empty field, where a few flowering weeds with tiny yellow blooms bowed and dipped in the slight wind. The softly sloping hills in the background reminded me of the well-worn toe of a yellow suede boot.<p>

"Thank the Lord," Levi kicked open the door from his seat behind the steering wheel and let out an exasperated sigh. He stretched his inked arms up to the clear sky, and leaned from side to side. The rest of us piled out, our black clothes in hand. I was feeling a little dazed: it had been close to six hours of driving, and we'd finally stopped to get our supplies together and change into our stolen priest's uniforms before meeting with the client.

"My legs are going to _fall off_." Levi groaned dramatically, he bent down to touch his toes and then came back up to press his palms onto his lower back and crack his spine loudly.

I chuckled and smoothed my black shirt out over my knee. "Not like you ever let anyone else drive."

"Touché." Levi shrugged slightly, grinning, and he pulled on his black bead rosary with a large silver cross that fell to the middle of his chest. The camper belonged to Levi and he made sure _everyone _knew it.

After the deluge of rain, the air felt like it had been scrubbed clean and it was lighter than normal. The sky was a flat, even blue, and the pure white cloud stacks were almost unbelievably structured. I pulled off my cotton tee, revealing that purple and sickly yellow watercolor bruise spreading onto my hip and ribcage. I pulled on my priest's uniform as quickly as possible and adjusted my clerical collar nervously, hoping no one else had noticed it.

"Here, let me get that," Kara huffed out a small laugh and helped me perfect my stolen uniform, reaching up with her long fingers and helping me tuck my collar just right.

"Thanks," I gave her an easy smile. Kara was always doing things like this, mothering us even though she was less than a year older than me. She wasn't the type of girl to wear rings or paint her nails, and her soft fan of eyelashes looked like they hadn't seen a coating of mascara in a while but they were beautifully long and downward pointing. She was somewhat delicate-looking, but we'd learned quickly that she didn't live up to her appearance.

Finding her when she was on the run had been a complete coincidence. Levi had never gone into someone's dream that was already occupied by another projector by accident, and that was how he met her. She'd done it on purpose, she'd explained in the dream. She was trying to find other people who were like her. Somehow, she found Levi again for multiple nights in a row. Needless to say, she was _damn _good at projecting.

Her tagging along with the three of us had, at first, been a business decision. Less work would be split between the three of the Projectors, so we could take more jobs more often, subsequently make more money, and help more people. But what had started off as a business decision just couldn't stay that way. It seemed to work that way often in this line of work; things just got too personal. All of us developed a soft spot for good ol' Kara. I was pretty sure Levi's had the fattest crush on her for the longest time, too. _She's his dream girl. Literally. Ha!_

She flashed me a grin. She had one pointed incisor that stuck out slightly more than the rest, one of the familiar little things about her that seemed to be part of her character rather than part of a dental structure. "You could at least look pretty since you're not the one doing any work." She laughed, brushing a lengthy strand of inky black hair away from her face.

"Oh, come on." I shot back. I knelt down and pulled off a sneaker, hopping on one foot. "When am I not drop-dead gorgeous?"

She laughed, flashing that imperfect tooth again. "I guess we won't be doing those makeovers I had scheduled for tonight then." She replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

"We could pluck Levi's eyebrows instead. Do a little manscaping?" I teased, and Levi flipped me off without even looking my direction as he shoved a foot into a shiny black shoe.

The whole business was a lot like drug dealing, really.

All of our customers came from word of mouth, their names traveling through a network of those who we'd helped before and those who were seeking a solution after they'd practically abandoned all hope. For these people to find out there was a type of "Specialized Exorcist" that could cure their loved ones got them fired up right away. We only left one source that someone could contact us by, and it was switched out and changed constantly. Once we were out of one state, we tried to cover our tracks like we'd never even been there in the first place.

Today, we were supposed to cure a man who had some pretty severe post-traumatic stress disorder, some depression and insomnia from a store robbery that had gone wrong, where he'd witnessed the murders of several people. I knew right away Sam wouldn't like this the most out of the three of them, no doubt he'd have to revisit the experience and I knew he hated that degree of violence. But we had to do what we had to do. The man was haunted, and it was up to us to help him when no one else could.

Levi reached up and rang the doorbell, and I tucked my hands primly behind my back, crossed my wrists, and shifted slightly from foot to shiny black-shoed foot. All four of us wore deep black shirts with the white clerical collars showing a small white square in the front. Kara and Levi had their long hair tied up into ponytails, I had mine neatly combed and parted to the side, and Sam's hair was, well, Sam's hair.

The house didn't look intimidating; in fact, it was very much the opposite. The one-story, squat little house was painted a cheery, albeit faded, yellow with white trims. It even had flower boxes with little red pansies, a nicely manicured lawn and a brick walkway. Well, there have been real demonic possessions with houses even more cheerful than this. You just never know what a sweet old grandma's pink home with a garden of tulips could be housing. I suddenly got the image of a sweet little English grandmother in fuzzy house slippers pouring a cuppa for a huge, bulky demon hunched over the dining room table, and the thing was trying hard to keep its long, spaded tail in check so it wouldn't accidently destroy her fine china, and I almost burst out laughing.

I got it together just in time for the bright red door to swing open, and a brunette woman with friendly and soft- almost doggish- brown eyes greeted us. She was wearing a white summery dress and it was very clear she'd done her softly curled hair for us. _Who was she trying to impress? _I thought to myself. Well, judging by the house, probably the neighbors.

"Good evening, ma'am." I greeted, trying to give her a reassuring smile but I had a feeling it had turned into something more like a rascally grin. Levi had told me before that he couldn't quite believe why anyone in their right mind would actually believe I was a real Priest, and a "specialized" one at that. Well, there were a lot of things people were willing to overlook, _like the fact that none of us were over twenty-five_. No one ever questioned it. Well, these people were desperate.

"Thank God you're here." She said nervously, her hands fluttery as she opened the red door all the way and motioned for us to come in. "Thank you, Father. You'll never believe what the neighbors-" _There it is _"-have had to say about my husband waking up the entire street with his screaming in the middle of the night! Gosh, I've had to move to the living room couch!"

The little home was clean and sweet down to the last detail. The walls were a cool robin's egg blue in the living room, every picture frame was the same color and shape and the photos were all in black and white. Two vases of white lilies were placed to be symmetrical with the television in between them. It was simply perfect for a magazine photo shoot.

We passed said couch, which had very precisely tucked blankets and about five decorative pillows arranged on the royal blue sofa. I couldn't decide if I loved or hated this woman.

She brought us down a bright yellow hallway and stopped in front of a white door at the very back, her manicured hand floating above the doorknob.

"Oh my, when the men from church told me how they couldn't help my dear Jamie, I...oh, well, I just went on a _rampage_." She whispered that last part under her hand, as if embarrassed. It was a little hard to imagine the woman with a waifish figure and such sweet brown eyes going on a "rampage", but hey. She _did _find us, didn't she?

She might have seemed like the perfect housewife, but we all knew she was really a go-getter. And like I said, business was a lot like drug dealing. I was actually pretty impressed she'd managed to find a way to get on the inside.

She seemed like the type of woman to wear a cheery sunflower apron while delivering a freshly baked pie laced with laxatives to a family whose son had punched her kid on the playground, and with an easy smiled she'd say it was a 'special' pie. Fuck it all, I'm deciding that I like her.

"He took some sleeping pills around an hour ago," His wife explained, leading the four of us into a bedroom that was just as nice as the rest of the house, this room gave off a kind of cottage feel with pastel walls and a little stone fireplace, and a yellow-and-white plaid bedspread.

"He should be ready for the exorcism, I made sure he only ate some healthy homemade veggie soup this morning, so I hope he won't be getting nauseous for all of you. I'm not quite sure how this whole thing works." She admitted, tugging at the bottom of her white dress. "Please, just...just help my husband. I love him too much to let him keep on like this, and I know he still loves me, too, but lately he can't even get out of bed, and he-" She shook her head, biting her bottom lip. "Anything you have to do to get James better. He's been suffering."

I looked down at the man with long, unshaven blonde bristles sprouting from his cheeks and a receding hairline sleeping on the bed. His eyes looked sunken, the bags apparent even with his eyes closed, and he was entangled in the blankets and snoring as he slept on his side, a pillow gripped tightly to his chest. Even sleeping, his face looked troubled.

We all got to work. Levi and Kara lit some sage, making sure the curls of grey smoke permeated each corner of the room while Sam broke out the cylinder of salt and poured it slowly with a faint hissing, the salt crystals formed a thin circle around the bed. When he passed by me, he muttered under his breath "but just think of the _potato chip potential_", and I somehow managed to pull off stamping on his foot without the wife noticing.

Then, there was all the Latin I'd been forced to memorize, holy-water flicking from steel flasks, kissing crosses on the rosaries dangling on our necks, all that jazz. Then, the real work started. The three projectors knelt down on the beds to "pray", I reassured the wife that this was almost over, just the last steps to make sure the spirit would be sealed out and wouldn't "re-enter", and asked her to leave for her safety.

"Are you sure I can't stay and watch?" She met my eyes, pleading. She cleared her throat. "I'm a much tougher cookie than I might seem, mister." It would not surprise me if I were to find out she was some kind of street rat before she found herself in this life.

"I believe you, ma'am, but really, this could be very dangerous." I lead her out of the room gently by the thin shoulders. "For both you and the baby."

Her doe-like eyes widened at me. "How did you..." Her voice trailed off and she looked at me in awe with those big brown eyes. I winked, elated I'd actually gotten it on the nose. "Good ol' JC, ma'am." Not laughing had never been harder. Man, I loved messing with people like this, when I'd have a hunch and follow it.

The woman left the room without another word and shut the door tight.

"Dude, you're so going to hell." Levi was red in the face from trying not to laugh.

"At least he's enjoying the trip." Kara retorted, and Sam snickered into his hand.

"Okay, _kids_, let's get it together." I rolled my eyes, pulled up a chair and sat at the foot of the bed. To think we'd been so serious about this at first. _That's a laugh._

"Sweet dreams, guys." That was another laugh. But who's counting?

I watched over the three of them, who had fallen deep asleep, like I always did. A wooden clock in the corner of the room ticked lazily. I would usually have a few minutes before anything would happen, and even that wasn't so exciting; sometimes the client would roll around and thrash and I'd have to make sure they didn't grab at any of my friends.

To be honest, my job wasn't nearly as exciting as it may seem.

My eyes flicked down to the three projectors kneeling on the edges of the bed; dark brown, copper and pitch black heads of hair, all their eyes moving slightly behind their lids, their faces completely slack as they sat with their hands intertwined in front of them like they were deep in prayer.

I'll admit, I sometimes hated that I couldn't help them. It wasn't like I didn't know what happened behind the scenes, Sam made it a point to always fill me in with all the details he could so I could feel like I was a part of it, so that I could understand and possibly classify M.I.'s that we hadn't come across yet. I did appreciate that he did that for me, but still. The distance between me, just a regular human, and them had never felt greater than now.

I usually just let my mind wander in these types of situations. I thought about how when we got back to the car I should probably check the maps and scope out the nearest public pool so the four of us could get a nice hot shower in tomorrow before we hit the Laundromat. I thought about our money supply and how we'd have to fork over a little extra to fix the broken A/C now that summer was almost here, and that thought led to me thinking about Levi and I spending months fixing up the old camper in his garage before we took to the road, and suddenly that launched me to the vivid memory of that one awful day in class with Levi.

It was a bittersweet memory. We'd been in History class, the one both of us hated the most because the woman who taught it was mean and ugly, with sunken eyes and jowls and the pasty skin she tried too hard to cake with makeup kind of made her look like the undead. Her flat, blue eyes peering behind old jewel-encrusted glasses didn't help much either.

I distinctly remember how old I was too, fourteen, because I wrote on the corner of the handout the date, which had been 03/03/333. With all those threes, my lucky number, I thought that somehow meant it was going to be a good day. Boy, was I wrong. We were learning about Government this week and today we were going over some of the worst Leadership scandals.

Man, I hated history. They only taught either BC or AM. Both were equally boring. It was always church, church, and more church. Biblical days or how the church saved everyone post-Rapture and was able to build something out of the ashes. Blah, blah. I hadn't really been paying attention to most of it. Maybe the Harvest had been neat while it was happening, but now, three hundred years later…. all the actually interesting stuff had been plucked off and we only got the bare bones. I couldn't stand it.

I'd mainly been doodling some devil's traps and sigils to practice for my test in a few days in Bible school. I loved how the graphite of my pencil felt on the pseudo-wood desk. It was so smooth on that surface, I could scrape down dark lines with barely even a sound. But that was when the teacher said something that caught my attention.

"...an underground network of astral projectors and the heathens they worked with had been planning an attack on the Pope for years..."

Pssh. _Pope_. Well, the "American" Pope. Nations all weren't on such great terms with one another nowadays, especially America, who had everything a little more bass-ackwards than anyone else. That was kind of to be expected to be honest. I mean, we're still holding out on feet and inches. What a load of barnacles. Not to mention the whole slowest-innovation-history-has-ever-seen thing, too. Nations didn't really try to help others anymore. It mainly had to do with the people in these nations. People in general weren't necessarily selfless anymore.

The teacher drolled on."...On August 26th, these people accomplished one of the most complicated and scandalous attack on our Pope in history. They called themselves the Mol Society. The title represented an irrational numerical value called Avogadro's number that they worshipped instead of our God, and the secrecy of the group because they did everything undercover. The members attacked our leader ruthlessly, dozens of astral projectors bombarded his mind until he could no longer fight them off. The attack was irreversible, but instead of leaving him brain dead, they'd turned him to the Devil."

The room was colored with several small gasps. I looked over to Levi, who was staring straight ahead and his fingers were curled over the sides of his desk, gripping down so hard his knuckles were white.

"They were never able to heal our dear leader's mind, and another had to quickly take his place. Even after fifty years he still was never the same man, until he was finally able to rest in peace and join God in his kingdom."

I was staring up at the teacher now, following Levi's gaze. She was staring back at my friend, not even breaking her gaze to switch to the next slide.

"Eventually, every single one of the members of the Mol Society was found out and rightfully executed, and our government has always been on high alert in case anything like that were to arise again, always keeping a close watch on those filthy Projectors-"

"Stop."

I almost surprised myself at how easily I'd spoken up.

This time, everyone turned around to look at me, and the slight shuffling and squeaking of chairs filled the air. The students then followed the teacher's gaze and were met by Levi's slightly sweating face in the thick silence that followed, his cheeks flushed very red in embarrassment and humiliation.

"Why doesn't everyone mind their own business?" I was relieved at how my voice was surprisingly strong, and I looked over to see Levi's pale face and tightly gripping hands over the edges of his desk. His knuckles were sinewy and white and his hands were shaking now.

"Dean, please. You're making it worse. Just stop." He hissed at me, looking over sideways at me.

"Mister Winchester, is there a reason you've chosen to interrupt me in the middle of my lesson?" She asked, tapping the meter stick she'd been using to point out the slides on the floor with faint clacks.

"They're not filthy." I'd spat, rage felt like a fire building in my chest.

"Dean, I'm merely speaking about this from a historical perspective-"

"Fuck you, lady." I felt that rage slip out, my own voice sounding more like a snarl.

Everyone gasped. A few rowdy boys began to holler and hoot. Mutterings spread throughout the classroom like a disease.

The teacher looked shocked but only for a second. "Mister Winchester, we will not tolerate that kind of language or behavior in my classroom!" Yet, despite her expression at first, my teacher's voice was stone cold as she glared at me. The rest of the students still hadn't turned around to face her again, they were excited and strung up about the student-teacher conflict that was brewing and seemed to be underway. "You will be joining me for detention after school for the next week-"

Levi stood up quickly, his chair making a loud groan of protest against the floor.

"Levi Forsyth! You will sit back down immediately or-"

Without a word, he sprinted from the rows of desks and out the door, the thing slamming loudly behind him with a hollow, wooden boom. The class was in a total uproar by now. Thinking about consequences hadn't even crossed my mind as I stood up right away to go follow him.

"Dean Winchester, you take one step towards that door and you will be joining your friend in detention for double the time!" The teacher was squawking, but I didn't even care enough to acknowledge that she'd said anything to me before I had also ran out the door of the classroom.

"Lev, wait!" I had called out to my friend's broad-shouldered back as he took long, angry strides down the empty locker-lined hallway. He showed no signs of slowing down.

I had sprinted after him, my footfalls booming and echoing slightly as I easily caught up with my long legs. "Levi, dammit, wait up!"

The figure finally stopped. Levi spun around, a defeated sagging in his shoulders as he faced me with a weary expression on his usually lively face. His reddish hair had wild, slightly curly flyaways around his freckled cheeks, he'd already started to grow it out by then.

I huffed and came to a stop in front of him. Levi had tried to make himself look big and defiant, planting his feet firmly shoulder-width apart and shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans.

"_What_?" Levi barked.

"Are you okay?" I asked, and it felt lame from the moment it left my lips.

"What the hell do you think?!" He'd snapped at me, tears beginning to shine in his light brown eyes. "That ugly, lying, discriminating _bitch_!" He'd cried and twirled around and punched a metal locker as hard as he could, and it let out a dull clang before he was hopping up and down and grasping at his bleeding hand. He met my eyes and kind of half-laughed a little at my very shocked expression.

"-That stuff looks way cooler in the movies," He'd grunted in pain, huffing out a little laugh again.

I cleaned him up in the boy's bathroom, smearing the blood off of his fist and washing the cuts up with some soapy cold water, and we sat up on the little ledge beneath the mirror and waited for the class to be over, pressing some paper towels to his fist until it stopped bleeding.

"Don't mind her." I'd told him, pumping the lever next to the paper towel dispenser. "She's got her head so far up her ass she can check for stomach ulcers." I handed him the towels and he smiled slightly at me and pressed them gingerly to his bleeding hand. He didn't reply.

"There's nothing wrong with you, Lev." I'd assured him, trying to make it show how much I really believed it.

I'd still have to repeat things along these lines to my little brother all the time, and Levi occasionally.

The man on the bed let out a slight moan and snapped me out of my daydream, before I could think about that day in detention and all the shit we'd pulled on that nasty teacher in the span of our detention hours alone in the classroom, rigging things and booby trapping and vandalizing.

Suddenly alert, I stiffened and straightened up in my chair, watching the client's sleeping face very intently. I reacted as quickly as I could as his callused, big hand shot out and grabbed hard onto Kara's thin bicep. Her pale flesh dimpled beneath his clawing fingers, and her face grimaced into an expression of slight pain. It took both of my hands to pry his hand off of Kara's arm, working a few fingers at a time until with a huff I was able to force his clawed hand to let go. With dismay, I noticed there were four little flat crescent shapes imbedded into her skin, and the skin was pinkish around the punctures. She'd have a painful bruise for a little while.

I took the man's hands and forced them together onto his lap and stood by the bedside, just making sure nothing else was going to happen. If he wasn't thrashing around like a fish out of water by now, there would most likely be little activity until the Projectors were done.

The man let out a soft, low moan, his temples were lightly misted with perspiration, and his leg twitched slightly before I grabbed it and held it down to prevent a large kick that would have impacted square onto Levi's face. The man let out a sigh so deep he seemed to deflate a little into mattress, and it was all over. I saw Kara's dark almond eyes fold open, and with a little frown she examined her arm.

She hummed in dismissal then rubbed it half-heartedly before standing up and stretching out her back.

So, time to wake up Sam.

I looked to my little brother, his brown eyelashes were fanned against his cheeks, his eyes rolled beneath his closed eyelids. I reached over and lay a gentle hand on his head. His brown hair flashed with a slight luster of gold as I gently moved the soft locks, trying to wake him up without saying anything. Touch could help, to serve as an anchor to bring him back to his own body. He found it a little overwhelming if I was calling his name at the same time, too, and touch had a stronger pull than sound anyway.

He was a little bit embarrassed about still needing an Anchor, Levi and Kara hadn't needed someone to shake them awake since they'd been little kids. But hey, if he pulled his weight during the fight against the manifestation, nobody cared. He was doing much more than I ever could, anyway. His light dilated eyes opened and he was discombobulated for a second before looking up to meet my eyes.

"You okay?" I asked, finally taking my hand off of his head. He looked at my with a long, drowsy blink, then reached over and wordlessly pulled me into a hug, his face squished up to the side of my torso and his arms looped around my hip. I chuckled and gave his back a few reassuring pats.

"Just...a bad one, you know?" He drawled in a sleepy voice.

"I know." I replied, resting my hand on his shoulder and looking over just to make sure Levi was able to wake up properly from the corner of my eye. "You don't have to tell me all about it this time, if you don't want to."

"All right," Sam nodded a little and stood up. I gently squeezed his shoulder just once, but I think it helped him feel a little bit better.

"Time to go," Levi yawned from behind me.

It always went like this; leave the room, get praised with thanks, collect our bonus, and get the hell out of dodge. A mostly endless, grey routine.

The husband woke up, and the three projectors began to file out of the room for me to deal with the monetary stuff. Sure, the money could buy us a tank of gas and some new clothes and maybe a burger, but the softness in this man's eyes as he looked to his wife like she was back from the dead, and the wobble of his chin...

"Felicity?" He asked, tears welling in his eyes. "Honey, it's..I think it's gone!"

The most likely ex-streetrat-turned-housewife threw her arms around me and gave me lively smooches on both cheeks, shoving rubber-banded rolls of bills into my fumbling hands.

"He's better already, sweetheart, oh, I can tell...thank you thank you thank you!"

_We're like our own little Mol Society,_ the thought fell into my head all of the sudden. Well, not exactly like it, not by a longshot, but we were similar enough to be significant. And even though that incident used to really terrify me when I was younger, it was nice that not everything had died with them.

The bonuses weren't the only reason we did this, why we put our necks out and risked so damn much for these people. It's because it mattered that they'd slipped through the cracks and the Church just couldn't help, it mattered that they were better now because of us.

Seeing every person's different reaction to being cured was really what kept me going.

I went back outside to join my friends in the camper, stuck the bills in a safe we kept under Kara's bed, and we were on the road once again. That's just how it always went.

It was just starting to get dark outside, and I sat in the passenger's seat as Levi drove and I just watched in silence as the sky darkened. Levi was smiling and singing, or cawing, one of his hands on the steering wheel and the other hanging out the window into the muggy summer night air. God, he was a terrible singer. That sure didn't stop him from doing it. I think he was probably so giddy because of the result with this client. I was too.

His smile only started to fade once the roads and surroundings starting getting more and more familiar, we were getting closer to our old homes and the places we grew up. Levi was dreading revisiting his childhood home, I could just feel it like it was vibrating from his skin.

I knew it was bad when we had to pull over and switch drivers. Levi hadn't even wanted to drive his prized camper, which was a bad sign in itself.

Going back to his mother's house was something Levi had been dreading ever since I'd told him about the job in Kansas, and suggested that we finally get around to seeing what she had left him. It took a lot of convincing to try and get him back here, and he was _not_ happy about it. He'd handed the wheel off to Kara and was now sitting in the passenger's seat, wallowing in his own dread.

The van's bright headlights illuminated a strip of the front of the house, where dozens of green, plastic planters squatted on the porch or were hung up by ropes, the twisted and brown contents inside them had died long ago. The paint was peeling away, some neighborhood kids had most likely broken a window, it looked generally spooky, especially viewing it with the bright headlights giving it a vignette effect and knowing it had been a witch's house.

"Well, this is it," Levi breathed. We came to a halt, the vehicle itself bobbing back as it stopped, as if recoiling from the house before it. Levi looked weary, apprehensively glancing through the camper's windshield at the dilapidated house as he twiddled thumbs in his lap.

"Nice driving, Kara." I retorted, coming up between the two front seats and I propped my elbows on the shoulders of chairs and observed the house before us. Levi pinched the bridge of his aquiline nose, looking away from the house for a second and sighing.

"Thank you!" Kara spoke kindly in reply, and shot me a bright smile, obviously missing my sarcasm. She pulled the key from the ignition. "I guess I'm breaking all the stereotypes, huh? You know what they say about driving with Asians and women-"

"You ran a red!" I covered my eyes with my palm, a smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.

"Oh, it was yellow." She waved the comment away easily.

"Of all the people Lev trusts with his prized camper, it had to be you-"

"Oh, can it, Dean. I did _fine_, and I-" She began laughing in earnest.

"I hate this house," Levi murmured, interrupting our playful argument. He looked at me with weariness in his caramel-brown eyes, ever more the child I'd once known him to be. "We can just turn back—"

"You know we can't," I warned him, the only one of the four of us to have actually fought _for _this trip. Sam hadn't really said anything, and Kara backed my decision because, well, she always seemed to back my decisions. If nobody else, that girl truly was a Godsend. "There's stuff you need to get rid of now that she's passed away. And you can't stay afraid of this place forever."

"It's . . . really, Mother was. . . ." Levi trailed off, as I stood up and clapped my hands together with an air of 'we have work to do.'

"Well, she's dead, so we might as well see if there's anything of hers we can use." I'd already begun to open the door when I heard a loud sigh. Levi wasn't exactly a timid guy, but I'd never seen him this riled up about something.

He stood very hesitantly and stared me directly in the face, in a way I hadn't seen for a very long time.

"You guys have to come with me," he demanded, to Kara and Sam and myself.

"This place gives me some serious heebie-jeebies," Sam replied almost immediately. "You know I never came here as a kid, Dad never let me, he didn't want her..y'know.._trying_ anything..on me.." He shuffled his feet nervously. "I'm, uh, gonna sit this one out."

"I . . . um, I don't wanna go," Kara worded carefully, and as I looked at her I shot her a glance. She shrugged back at me, her button-black eyes laughing, but it was clear what she was doing. The girl didn't normally seem to have an ounce of fear in her. I think she opted out of visiting Levi's house because she knew how personal it would be for him. Knowing Levi, he'd try to be all 'tough-guy' to impress her, and the visit would have taken on a whole different vibe. Y'know, I don't think I give her enough credit sometimes, the sly dog. "Besides, someone has to watch over the camper."

"Well, I'm not going in alone!" Levi crossed his arms. "Guys..._c'mon_."

"Calm down," I laughed off his fear, which made his face flush with embarrassment. "She makes a good point," I continued (knowing full-well that she'd, in fact, made no 'good points' at all), "and I'm still going. C'mon, Lev." As I opened the camper's side door and gestured to Levi to follow.

"Just like old times, right man?" I reassured him. And we crept forward in the dark to the abandoned witch's house in the dark. _Peachy_. And to think if I'd made some different life choices I'd probably be praying 'Hail Mary' for every single bead of a rosary to some elderly woman right now- _Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus…_

_Would I still want to be here, if I had the choice?_ My ankle rolled slightly in a shallow hole of loose dirt in the yard and I caught my balance. The house indisputably _loomed_.

_Sancta Maria, Mater Dei…_ I went once again to keep up with Levi's lengthy strides with my long legs.

Ah, fuck it all. Yes, I would.


	5. Chapter 5

Levi stepped gingerly onto the grounds of his fears, the stepping-stone walk-path leading to his front porch covered over with seasoned wild growth. The house was ramshackle to its last shingle, the full two stories of it leaning to one side just as they had in those days long ago. Every window was boarded up, a few notably broken from tossed stones or baseballs, and the door itself was but an entrance barred by three overlapped slabs of wood. The dark brown paint was peeling and warped like cellulite from the heavy sea air.

_Just like it used to be_, I thought as I finally caught up to him.

"Just like it used to be," Gabe noted with some dissatisfaction when he noticed I was back at his side, he shoved his hands deep in his pockets.

"I can go inside first if you—" I tried, but Gabe interrupted me quickly.

"No, you were right," he mumbled, before taking the lead up the first peeling porch step. I followed dutifully behind him, the wooden step creaking hollowly. His mother had died almost a year ago, and had left this house and whatever was left in it since then to him. And ever since a series of very unnatural events and deaths with a few of Levi's mother's foes, we both knew there had to be something she'd left behind that was hurting people even after her death. We needed to find out what that was.

Levi didn't hesitate to throw all his body weight behind him as he kicked open the boarded up door, the plank falling away mainly because the nails were imbedded into rotting wood. I followed and wrinkled up my nose at the stench of the place as it hit me like a wall. I ducked under a plank and stepped inside.

Bird bones littered the dining room table, as well as a few candles burned down to white warty stubs, yellow-paper books, and more dry, dead plants. Some kind of summoning sigil was painted on the clear half of the table with bright red spray paint.

"She was trying to bring dead birds back to life." Levi shook his head. "Of course she couldn't. Necromancy- that's not life."

Levi's mother had been an..._eccentric _witch. "_Eccentric" as a polite way to say she had no idea what the fuck she was doing,_ I thought bitterly. I recalled memories of the disheveled, stout woman with the nest of crazy orange hair and unstable smile and frowned. I'd never liked her.

Levi touched the tiny skull of what I'm guessing was some kind of sparrow or finch, picked it up and rolled it in his palm. "What kind of mother uses her only son as a guinea pig, Dean?" He asked in a soft, heartbroken tone. "I don't _understand_...I don't know why she did this to me." He hung his head and placed the small, round skull back down very gently on the table again.

Levi was the worst sleepwalker I've ever met. He was probably one of the worst sleepwalkers anyone will ever meet.

His mother had tried to create a kind of binding spell that could keep her son's soul from wandering.

"She was trying to protect you," I replied, and he pressed the back of his hand to the bottom of his nose, trying hard not to cry. She had good intentions, of course. It was dangerous to be an astral projector, especially from such a young age when it was hard to control it. And if Projectors proved to be any trouble, they were stolen away, and God knows what happened to them from there. This world had a lot of things that were stifled under wraps.

Needless to say, her spell had backfired big time. Well, to be fair, it _had _worked... sort of. Levi's body and soul were in a loose bind, but that meant his body got up and wandered as he slept as well as his soul.

I remembered ditching school with him the day after his mom had tried the spell because the poor guy was so freaked out. It still gives me the creeps that she'd offered to do the same spell for Sam, and my parents had been considering it, but at the last minute had said no. Thank God for that. Witches in this world weren't exactly common, but they weren't uncommon either. It was just simply an unusual occupation.

With all this Church stuff, you'd think witches would all be tossed in the river to see if they could float or not, get all their moles prodded at or be executed in some likely horrendous way. Well, the thing was, witches knew a hell of a lot about demons and how to get rid of them. Black magic users and churchfolk became unlikely allies, you know, "back then", when everything was still pretty chaotic immediately after the Rapture.

It wasn't like the church was some shining beacon of purity either. It was the perfect match made in hell (almost literally, seeing that half of hell had spilled out onto Earth). Witches, like demons, were starting to dwindle nowadays, but there were still a few, and it had been in Levi's bloodline for generations.

I thought about the fever-ridden ginger kid in his ridiculous two-piece blue shark pajamas and I wandering the woods and looking high and low for evidence of what he'd done overnight. He could tell he'd been up and about because of all the dirt wedged under his fingernails and caking his sheets. "There was a bike and a rabbit in it, in my dream." Gabe had said with shaking hands. The whites of his eyes had been shiny and pinkish with unshed tears and his round little face had been all ruddy from his high fever (the spell had made him pretty sick). I'd always know that terrified little ten-year-old was in there, somewhere. It was reassuring, in a strange kind of way.

After a long day of searching, Levi found out he'd buried his bicycle in the woods about two miles away. One handlebar stuck up out of the ground like a curious periscope. We still have no idea what happened to the rabbit. Maybe it was buried down there with it, or maybe there was never a rabbit at all. We never found out. And we won't bring it up to one another, either. _Ever_.

Since that night and the spell-gone-wrong, Levi had to keep himself tied up every single night. He'd learned the hard way that his sleeping self could act just as aware as his conscious self: no more taking the keys to bed with him, or even having them remotely within reach. No bind could be easy enough to untie with one hand, or his sleeping self would untie it. Levi found the handcuffs to be the best possible solution, and he found out other things gradually too. He'd have to put on anti-chaffing cream, and he'd have to replace the worn-down pole every few years, too, or that could snap as his sleeping self struggled to escape.

I still thank my lucky stars every night that that woman never laid a finger on my brother. I've always known that if something sounds too good to be true, you can be damn sure it _is_. This isn't an easy world we're living in, that's for sure.

"C'mon, let's look around. Maybe there's something useful for us somewhere around here. And I still haven't seen any of those Voodoos." I prodded, curling a hand over his shoulder just so he would leave his damn bird-zombie table.

The rest of the house was just as bad. The kitchen was a rotten jungle of plants long dead, the living room looked like a tornado had hit it with all those open, yellowed books everywhere. Mismatched tea saucers with dusty, dried up teabags still were piled up on the coffee table, and a large copper bowl with deep black residue staining the inside squatted on the rest of the table, shining very dully.

"Thieves would have taken anything of value by now." Levi spoke up, breaking the eerie silence. "Money, jewelry...they've had enough time to pick this place clean already."

"Wish you'd come here earlier after she'd died?" I asked, glancing in disgust at some kind of mangled ball of fur that kind of resembled an owl pellet but could have been anything, really.

"Hell, no." Levi answered with a little bit of a chuckle. "We're fine on money. And Kara doesn't wear jewelry anyway."

I was about to tease him a little about his long-standing crush on her when I spotted a few framed photos on the mantle of the cobwebby brick fireplace, which immediately caught my interest. One was of Levi as a baby in his mother and father's arms, as a toddler wearing jean overalls, as an elementary school student with his arm thrown around-

"Hey," I smiled and took the photo from the mantle and smeared off the dust film covering the glass. I tipped my head back and made a wide, goofy smile, trying to imitate the one from the photo as I held it up to my cheek. "It's me!"

"You haven't changed a bit, either." Levi chuckled, taking the photo from me and examining it up close. He swung open the back of the frame and tucked the glossy photo into his pocket. "I think that's pretty much the only thing worth taking in this whole house."

"Awww," I cooed. "You flatter me."

"Ah, shuddup." He laughed. "I actually mean it. This whole house is a rotten nest of shit I never want to see again."

"You want to poke around upstairs?"

"I guess we don't really have a choice, do we?" Levi bit his lower lip. "To think she actually left me anything..." He sighed. "I'm an idiot. But at least ten people she, well, _wasn't friends with_ to put lightly have had some bad things go down, and I suspect it's her doing. So we should look until we find out what that is."

Going into the depths of the house was like being swallowed, and a sense of dread crept over me as Levi began to ascend the creaky staircase into darkness. I had the childish urge to reach up and grab the back of his light grey tee or maybe hold his shoulder, but I fought it back. I wasn't a little kid anymore. I had a hit count for fuck's sake, I shouldn't be afraid of a little darkness.

We came up to the second floor, which started with a narrow hallway with doors leading to other rooms, all shut tight.

"What's to your left?" I asked, clearing my throat and trying to sound more confident than I really was.

"Bathroom," Levi all but grunted, pushing easily past it.

"Should we-"

"Hell no. If the bathroom was bad when I left, imagine what a year without any kind of cleanup left it like." Levi explained. "Last time I checked she was attempting to raise a baby Kraken in the tub, and before that she was trying to splice rats and koi fish to make these rodent mermaids-gah." He shuddered. "No. Nothing's going to be in there."

"What about your old room?" I asked. "Which one of these is that?"

"It's bare." He answered. "I've been living out of that camper parked in the driveway on blocks, God bless-"

"You literally worship that thing, Lev, and it's unhealthy."

"Oh, shut your mouth. What I was saying is I've lived out of that thing since I was eleven and I won it off that guy in a poker match." Levi replied smugly. He just loved bringing that up. The thing was a hunk of junk when he'd won it and we'd spent almost all of high school fixing that thing up, that man had probably just been relieved to finally get rid of it that piece of crap.

"Still one of the best stories I've ever heard, by the way." I threw in anyway, and that made Levi grin (finally).

"Well, you grew up with crusty old-ass boring Priests half the time. No wonder you never heard great stories." He shot back.

"_Hey_!"

"Well, it's true." He shot me a smirk very reminiscent of the ones Sam would give me. I think our poking fun at each other was helping the situation just a little bit as he nonchalantly opened one of the last doors on the hallways.

I shivered when we met a crowd of dolls all lined up on a bare, dusty bedframe, I only noticed a second later that all of the doll's eyes were closed, just a flap of tan plastic with a square of bristles at the bottom.

"Don't touch anything. Don't even move." Levi's voice was low and sent additional shivers down my spine.

"Are they...?"

"Voodoo dolls, yes." Levi chewed on his lower lip, tears beginning to sparkle in his light brown eyes. His hands were burrowed very deep in his pockets. "She wasn't...she said she'd never do things like..like _this_.."

I noticed one of the dolls with closed eyes was thoroughly overtaken with white and green mold, blooming in fuzzy circles on the smooth, plastic cheek and all over the pink floral dress the doll was wearing. Even the doll's curly blonde hair was overtaken and snowflaked with mold, though all the dolls around it remained untouched by it.

"Her name was Diane." Levi said quietly, noticing me staring at the only moldy doll in the bunch. "She was pretty awful to Mother. She died maybe eight or nine months ago from cancer."

Others had their little doll skulls crushed, or slashed, stabbed clothing, one even had tiny black tire tracks across his chest. A black spider crawled on slow, spindly legs on a cracked arm, and I was going to throw up if I couldn't get out of here soon. I had the sudden, silly urge to start spewing some protective Latin incantations I'd learned but swallowed that down. Old habits die hard, I guess.

"What are we supposed to do about these?" I asked in a sickly voice, my hand had wandered to my stomach and I pressed down hard.

"I don't know."

For some reason, I felt anger flare up inside me. What did he mean he didn't know? These people (God, maybe upwards of a dozen people) were suffering and he didn't _know_?

"Don't you know how to break it?" I asked desperately. "Sever the ties between their bodies and the dolls?"

Levi was very quiet, his eyes lowered to the ground. "Dean, they're dead already. That's why all their eyes are closed." He explained with a tight huff of breath.

I was hit with memories of how desperate Levi had been to leave here, to even just get out of his room and of this house, and my gut twisted sourly. He'd never wanted anything to do with his mother from a very early age, and he especially hated her after the binding spell. It was awful of me to try and put the blame on him like this.

"I'm sorry." I whispered.

" 's okay." He mumbled back, and I sighed.

"I know how you get with...y'know, helping people." Levi let out a loud, pent up sigh. "We just can't do anything this time, man."

"Okay."

We just stood in the doorway, and I counted the dolls. Twelve. But then I noticed one other in the dark corner of the room.

"Hey, Lev? What's that?" I asked, and pointed to the corner where it sat.

Levi almost fainted when he saw the doll, and he swayed a little. "Whoa, Lev!" I shouted, my arm shot out to steady him.

"Holy shit, Dean." Levi stared blankly ahead. The entire thing was bright, porcelain white. It was completely featureless with white hair, whitish-grey irises, and blank, china skin. It was like a little ghost doll. A small leather notebook sat on the doll's lap.

_~My dearest Levi~_it said in beautiful gold looping cursive on a brown leather cover.

"What...what is that?"

"It's a Blank." Levi replied, his voice tight and wavering. "I guess this is...what Mother decided to leave me with. Her will to me. The reason I came here."

"So it's..." Fucking hell, this felt all felt so wrong.

"It's without an assignment. It's not matched with a body as of now. And it takes a lot of skill to make just one." Levi reached out and gingerly took the notebook into his palm. He scanned it silently, his frown dropping even lower. He slipped the small notebook into his pocket, the same one that held our photo.

"We should take it." Levi cleared his throat and spoke up, his voice the strongest I'd heard since we'd come in here. I felt my expression drop.

"You can't be serious." I stiffened and met his caramel brown eyes. The casual air when we'd been joking around a few moments ago was long gone. I squared off against him. "I thought you didn't know how to do these thing anyway."

"This notebook has the spell. We can't just leave this here, Dean, it could be _useful_." He met my eyes desperately.

I felt my hands curl into fists. "There's _always_ a different means, Levi, goddammit."

"Just for emergencies. Only when we have no other option, I promise." Levi looked over at me, his expression was pleading. "Mother left this to me, for all I know it's the only things she's left me with."

I took a second to think. I never wanted to touch witchcraft with a twelve-foot-pole, but he _did_ have a point. If we ever got backed into a corner with no means of escape, maybe this "Blank" could buy us just a little time.

"Fine," I finally huffed gruffly, waving the comment away. "Just..I don't want to see it, I don't want to know about it, all right?" I pinched the bridge of my nose and shut my eyes. What was going _on_ with me this week?

"Agreed." Levi went forward and took the doll, slipping it into the big pocket on his hoodie like some kind of creepy kangaroo. "I'm serious, this will only be used in _dire straights_."

"Fine," I rubbed my eyes and let my hands drop again. "Just...tell the others on your own time, okay?"

"I will." Levi straightened up and brushed off his hands. "Now, there's nothing left here anymore but some twisted, fucked up witch shit. Let's go."

"All right," I finally agreed. I knew he must be pretty drained from this.

I trailed him as he made his way toward the staircase. He stopped at the very top before his descent, his hand perched on a knob on top of the railing.

"Thanks," He began, still facing away from me. "For coming in here with me."

"No problem." I answered. I knew this was a big ordeal for him. We'd come here to inspect this place once and for all, and now we never, ever had to come back.

We walked in silence downstairs, past the rotting books, dead plants and bones and finally I ducked under that plank of wood to get outside once again.

I only realized how stuffy and foul it had smelled once I'd gotten back into the fresh air again.

Levi strode up to the driver's seat again. "Scootch over," He told Kara. He was back to being behind the wheel of his own camper, which was invariably his pride and joy. Kara smiled and moved over to the passenger's seat.

"Good to see you're feeling better." She patted his leg. Levi not wanting to drive his prized car had been a bad sign.

"Yeah, let's just get the hell out of here." Levi muttered and the camper coughed to life, lumbering in reverse over the cracked, weedy driveway and back onto the road.

That night, I spent some time managing our money supply and calculating expenses by the bright, bluish LED light of our red battery lamp. It was mainly to calm myself down after the disaster today, letting Levi bring a cursed object into this camper._ What the __**hell**__ was I thinking?!_ I made an executive decision that we weren't coming back here to Kansas for a long, long time.

By now, everyone in the camper was asleep. Sam snored softly next to me, curled up like a giant, oversized cat, and Levi's white-noise scraping of a handcuff on a metal pole had started a little while ago from downladder, so I knew he was asleep already too. I came down the slightly squeaky rungs of my cramped roost to grab a bottled water from the fridge, and there it was.

The picture Levi had taken from his house was tacked up on our peeling mini-fridge with a red circle magnet advertising cheap oil changes. I smiled and looked over toward Levi. He was turned toward me, his reddish hair falling over his cheek and pillow. His open eyes were glazed, like he was staring right through me. One of his eyes was fully dilated, a deep black hole, while the other was his usual friendly caramel brown. It gave his face an off-balanced look, like a dog with one blue and one brown eye. It was the only physical result of Levi's broken half-projecting.

Levi's tattooed arm was stretched over his head, dangling by his pair of silver handcuffs. He tugged half-heartedly on the handcuffs again, with a _very _familiar scraping sound that had been my white noise at night for the past two years. I recalled the sadness in his eyes from earlier today as he rolled that sparrow's skull in his hand; _I don't know why she did this to me._

A strong surge of sympathy pushed through me like a wave. I closed the fridge door with a soft suctioning sound and looked at the photo of the two kids in the photo once again. We were so young that our big front teeth still had ruffled bottoms. Those had been the days when I'd sported this ugly blonde bob that kind of resembled a bowl cut and Levi's reddish hair had actually been _short_ for once. I realized I'd probably never want anyone else to be living out of a tin can with but these four. They were my family now.


	6. Chapter 6

I gazed into the gaping round mouth of the machine.

_Have the inside of these dryers always been this big?_ It looked a lot bigger on the inside than the outside, like I could fit a whole sofa in there. Eh, maybe this particular company was actually getting some innovation for once. Who knew. I thought nothing more of it as I chucked some sopping wet clothes into the dryer.

"-Yeah, fine." Sam answered softly, to a question I hadn't remembered asking. He was lying with his back on the little wooden bench, one knee bent and the other straightened out, his head lolling to the side as he watched some sudsy clothes sweep back and forth along a little clear bubble of glass. He was just wearing a pair of red plaid boxers and a white tank top as he waited for all his clothes to wash.

"You didn't really need to be my Anchor this time, you know." Sam continued, shaking his head slightly. A slight blush was on his cheeks, and he avoided my eyes. "I could have made it back by myself."

"You're getting better at Projecting then, huh?" I finally was able to fall into the conversation again, I hopped up onto the Laundromat machine and crossed my ankles.

"I don't know." Sam mumbled, not because he was trying to be rude, but because he was embarrassed, I knew. He'd told me before: If he was going to be cursed with something, he might as well be _good _at it.

"Well, it's better than I could have done." I told him jokingly. "And all of you were faster this time. Under ten minutes."

Sam just hummed in response, watching the suds smear across the glass. He looked pensive and far away. Finally, he straightened up, leaned on his elbow and looked at me with a small frown on his face. "Dean, I have to tell you something-"

The angles in the store seemed to shift with a loud, groaning lurch, and then everything glitched like in a video game. Pixels skittered and sharp spikes of saturated color slashed across my vision before everything settled again.

_That was weird._

I shot a panicked glance at Sam, and he was looking at me like nothing had happened. Except nothing was the same.

The Laundromat was brightly lit once again, almost painfully bright. During that split second of something I'd seen, since the image threaded all back together, I knew those colors I'd seen had to be _underneath _me; neon greens, flush pinks, grainy black and white, cartoon laundry machines with lines like lava lamp wax all pulled and blobby, all variations of the scene I was looking at all existed below this surface. There were all different planes, and for that split second they'd peeled away and I'd _seen_ them, and I could _feel_ them now, the weight of them…the sheer multitude of layers I was on top of made my head spin.

And now the angles here all are all wrong, because I was facing North before…but now the whole store had spun around, I could just tell, everything looked the same but it wasn't, and I could feel the difference and everything was just _wrong_ but I couldn't see it and and

The feeling finally passed, and I felt dizzy and very confused in attempting to understand that strange thing that I'd just felt. I pressed a palm to my forehead. "Tell me what?" I asked Sam, and it felt as if my mouth was speaking for me, like I was drunk. I completely forgot what I was even asking of him, and Sam clammed up and looked away.

"Never mind. It's nothing," Sam lay back down and turned his head to look at the clothes being washed again. Why those soapy, pulsing clothes give him so much serenity I can only begin to guess. He seemed like he was eight again as he watched, and I chuckled a little and roughly scrubbed his dark hair as I passed and made my way to the back. "_Dean_," He whined a little in feigned annoyance.

Then, I looked up and felt like I'd been hit by a semi-truck.

Castiel was washing his clothes in the same Laundromat as us. Without a word, I darted behind a wall of washing machines and peeped out with the caution one might reserve when they think a sniper is nearby.

What are the goddamn odds?

Castiel still had those old crusty bloodstains on that white cross on his black uniform, he had a bruised cheek that extended partially to his nose, it matched the purple-and-yellow watercolor display he'd left on my hip. A dark red split was on the corner of his chapped upper lip, and two small white steri strips held together a cut on the corner of one of his eyebrows.

He hadn't neatly combed and styled his dark hair like a prick today either, I figured he thought if he looked like that he may as well not even bother, and his natural hair was messy and disheveled. He sighed, peeled off the black shirt with the cross and threw it into a washing machine, his plain white shirt underneath had a few buttons on the top coming undone. He re-buttoned the white shirt underneath so that it was pulled up conservatively all the way up to pinch the base of his Adam's apple, then absent-mindedly touched a finger to the white strips on his eyebrow before digging for quarters.

I _knew_ I should have gotten rid him, goddammit!

"Sam!" I hissed, motioning wildly for my brother to come join me on the floor so we could make a swift exit. He didn't hear me, staring into the depths of that soapy dome, his leg hanging over the bench bobbing up and down. "Sam, you bastard, _Sammy_!" I hissed a little louder.

He perked up, finally. He looked left, right, and then finally at me. He tipped his head to the side, a lock of brown hair on top of his head flopping over as if it were confused too. I motioned dramatically at him, raising my eyebrows.

_What?_He mouthed at me.

_Come here!_I mouthed back, motioning again and frowning at him.

He narrowed his eyes. _Why? _He mouthed again, and I rolled my eyes and a small groan escaped my lips.

_Fucking come here!_

Sam finally dropped to his knees and scooted along the floor to get to me crouching behind a washing machine. "What is it?" He asked, plopping down next to me on his butt and hugging his hairy legs to his chest.

"See that guy right there?" I motioned to Castiel, who was facing away now and the better side of his face was showing, with only a minor red cut splitting on a small y-like shape on the tip of his cheekbone.

"What about him?" Sam asked, staring and squinting as the guy took out another shirt.

"That's _Cas_!" I hissed. We both coincidentally peeped over the machines at the same time and I yanked Sam down hard by the shoulders.

"Are you trying to get us both killed?!" I scolded him in a rough whisper.

"Well, what are we supposed to do?" Sam whispered loudly at me, his eyebrows drawn down hard over his eyes.

I shrugged angrily and gripped my hair in one hand, little tufts sticking up between my fingers. "We have to get out of here," I said a little breathlessly, and I heard a kind of groaning. _Not again._ I watched, mesmerized, as the ceiling warped slightly. _What the_...

The walls bowed in closer, distorting the shape of the room so I could no longer see a right angle anywhere. Everything was swollen and warped, the walls seemed to be creeping even closer, threatening to close in on us and implode. The building itself moaned with these changes, and I got a very bad feeling this thing was _alive_, like it was some kind of creature disguised as a building.

There was suddenly a loud, metallic click at the front of the store. _The doors_. I met Sam's wide eyes and his surprised expression, both of us frozen in place. I spun around, wondering just how the hell Castiel had been able to get to the button behind the counter for the mechanism to shut those doors, but Sam was gone by the time I turned back around again.

There was a different kind of mechanical clicking this time: the one from a gun.

"Oh, you son of a bitch..." I growled and gripped the edge of a white machine and to pull myself up.

Castiel gave me an accomplished, smug smile that looked like would re-tear that nasty split on his lip if he went any wider. He nodded to the gun he had positioned at Sam, who was in front of him. There was a silver cross on the barrel of the gun- enough said.

Sam had his hands to the sides of his head, palms spread wide and his head dipped. Castiel advanced forward and pressed the sharp edge of a blade to his throat too. Sam didn't protest.

"That's a little overkill, don't you think?" I nodded to Castiel holding the gun in one hand and the knife in the other. It was a bad habit, running my mouth like this when I was in danger.

The machines all around us kept humming and clunking and whirring as sopping wet clothes churned inside, the only sound was the whirrs and the beats of the dozens of white washing machines lined up like gigantic teeth. For a second, they actually really did seem like teeth and a jolt of fright bolted down my spine. _What the fuck..?_

The machines were curved. The machines had curved around slightly and now they really were a perfectly straight row of teeth and oh _GOD_ I'm really being eaten alive aren't I?!

The lights in the building flickered drastically, pitching me into blackness, then they blazed back on, fell to black again, and then the building had spun once again but I couldn't pinpoint exactly how I knew that.

I felt my stomach roll slowly and I felt like I was going to be sick. Sam made a strangled kind of choking noise, and Castiel slashed his throat. Blood splattered onto a stark white washing machine, a red spray, the machines were lined up like teeth, and my _own _teeth...

I could feel them, they were unclean, meat was wedged into the gaps and rotting into my gums, and there was blood now in my mouth, ironish and sharp, and it was everywhere-

_oh my god so much blood_

_! ! !_

"_Dean_!" It was Sam's slightly coarse voice, I felt my shoulders being roughly shoved. It was a battle to just open my eyelids, but I managed and peered into my brother's wide black pupils, some of his floppy brown locks were falling messily into his face. His mouth was a bloodless line pressed tight, his greenish-blue eyes were rapidly darting back and forth, searching my face.

He let go of my shoulders: he'd been gripping so tightly that they throbbed a little. I sucked in a big breath and sat up, leaning onto my elbow and using my other hand to run my fingers through my hair and then down my face. I was in the little roost in the van, just like when I'd fallen asleep last night.

"Dream, huh?" I grunted. It was the crisp morning air and the temperature that began to ground me immediately, helping me discern being awake from that strange, awful dream.

"I'm sorry," Sam looked like some kind of guilty puppy who'd pissed on the rug as he sat back and played with his hands in his lap, only looking up at me in brief increments and spending the rest of his time twisting his fingers together and pulling nervously on the thick skin of his knuckles. "You...you said I could find you if I slipped up."

_Ah_.

That explains why everything had been so vivid and real at some points, yet so strange in others. Projectors had that effect on dreams. I recalled he starchy texture of the white washing machines, and all those colors bursting and stacking beneath what I was viewing, the angles and somehow knowing I was spinning even without reference points, and those allusions to teeth..._oh, god_.

I still didn't feel so good.

My stomach was a tightly tied knot in my belly and I ran my hands down my face once more, the touch reassuring me that I really was awake now.

" 's okay," I replied instead, and then ran my tongue along each tooth to make sure I didn't _actually _have rotting pieces of meat wedged between them. Sam observed me sadly.

"It's fine. Really. I'm fine." I insisted again, and sat up all the way. God, no wonder Sam had been shaking the other day. The things he had to deal with and see were capital N, capital F, 'Not Fun.'

"I won't go into your dreams anymore if you don't want me to." Sam's looked at his hands again, nervously picking at the pale, taught skin between his fingers.

"It's fine." I said again. "Rather me than some stranger's head, right?" I crawled over toward the ladder, trying to make it seem like it was no big deal.

"Wait," Sam said so quietly that I was surprised I even was able to catch it.

I turned around. Sam looked small and young, his face seemed much softer than usual, and he had a pastel quilt shrugged over his shoulders. He was gripping onto his ankles like he'd float away if didn't.

"You're not..._afraid_ of me, right?" Sam pulled a blanket up onto his lap, and he looked very small to me. "I tried to tell you it was a dream, but your mind didn't want me to. That's why it gave you that glitch."

"No, I'm not _afraid_ of you, Sam." I ran my hand down my face again. "That glitch did feel pretty weird, but I'm fine."

I looked at him and give him a weary smile. He attempted to smile back, just the corner of his mouth lifting sadly. He sighed, and there was a short silence as he stared at his feet.

"I went to someone else before you." He swallowed and looked away, his Adam's apple bobbing. "I was memory searching, it was something I've never really attempted before. It tired me out. His subconscious may have wounded mine, I think. It felt like I was crawling back here. You were, well, just right _there _so I had no other choice but to hunker down if I didn't want to be lost and...Dean, I'm so sorry."

Lost. It was one of my greatest fears to happen to my brother, or Levi, or any projector, really. People had a theory, that all evil spirits and ghosts were the lost souls of projectors whose bodies had died while they were 'out', or who could never find their way back and time ran out. I knew regular humans souls could have just as easily become spirits, unable to move on, but not many people really believed that. Projectors wound up being scapegoats for a lot of things, no matter how valid it was or not.

"I went to check on Castiel. I was able to see a few memories, like it was a movie. Sound and sight and smells and, well, everything." Sam beamed at me, the first real smile this morning.

"You-you looked into his memories?" I asked, feeling my heart leap into my throat. He was getting better, despite what he always said. Before this, he had only been able to tap into surface thoughts, ones being created in real time in which Sam could monitor current worries on a person's mind. But _this_, actually digging down and getting visuals and audio of the past, real memories, it made me feel like maybe the walls weren't closing in on us as fast as I really thought. Maybe our end of the road could be further down the road.

Sam cleared his throat, dipped his head and tried unsuccessfully to hide his stupid dopey smile as he nodded a little, his head bobbed from side to side. "Well, yeah, kinda."

"Why didn't you tell me earlier?" I asked, ecstatic, and gripped his shoulders, roughing them back and forth a little.

"I..well, didn't think I could. I've never tried it before." Sam answered. "I didn't exactly come with an instruction manual, you know? I have to _find _my ropes before I can even begin to learn them."

"Well, what did you find out?" I asked excitedly. "Where does he think we're going? Does he know anything?"

"Well, he's far away, for now. A state over. He's…well, he's still looking." Sam explained, pressing his lips together in a kind of disappointed frown on the side of his mouth.

"Well, does he have leads on us?"

"No." Sam answered confidently, clasping his hands in his lap once again. "Not right now, at least."

"Good." I nodded curtly. This was my job, protecting the people in this camper. I couldn't do their share of the work projecting, so this is really all I was good for. And I intended to do my damn job.

"It was kind of weird, seeing you beating me up in first person." Sam frowned. "You scared the shit out of him. He really thought you were going to kill him." Sam looked away and his eyebrows drew together. "You…_wouldn't_ have, right..?"

I couldn't look at him just then, and my lack of remorse scared me more than anything. I'd beaten, stabbed, or shot my way through all those people who had been stalking us. So why couldn't I just bring myself to feel _bad_ about it?

"Dean..?" He prompted again unsurely.

"Eight." I spoke up, my voice wavering slightly. "He would have been my ninth, but he wasn't."

Sam shook his head adamantly. "No, see, _you're not_-"

"Do you ever feel like you're one of the darnels, Sam?" I asked instead, interrupting him.

"Yes," Sam whispered guiltily, avoiding my eyes. "Yeah, I do think so. All the time."

"I don't." I replied. "And that's how I know I am one."


	7. Chapter 7

Hi everyone! Thank you for reading :) Unfortunately, this is all I had pre-written, and I will have to put this story on hold for the month of November because I am trying to win my first year of NaNoWriMo. I will still be eager to read any kind of reviews, though! I will begin updating again as soon as I can. Bye only for a little while (I promise!) :)

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><p>"Have you noticed Sam's looking a little worse for wear today?" Kara asked me, twisting her inky black hair that was drying in pin-straight strands in her towel after our showers at the public pool.<p>

"Yeah, I saw that. I'll ask." I sighed and scrubbed at my hair with a towel. "Thanks for keeping an eye out for 'im."

"Of course." Kara looked a little troubled. "Just…make sure he's not pushing himself too hard, all right? Something like that happened to me once when I was still learning."

"I will. Thanks, Kara."

Sam was mad at me, not like I didn't expect him to be. I just told him the actual _numbers_ of what I'd done. _Eight, Dean? Eight?!_ He'd accused. _You've **killed** people and you never thought to tell me what the hell you were doing...yes, I'm fucking mad at you- just leave me alone! _

Sam _did_ look a little worse for wear: his expression was weary and his greenish eyes appeared a little glassy with swatches of purple underneath them. When we started to make our way to the camper we'd parked once again, he'd winced and pressed his palm to his lower back. It didn't go unnoticed.

"You all right?" I asked with a lifted brow.

"I'm fine," He mumbled very dismissively, dipping his head to avoid my eyes. I didn't push the subject, not now at least.

Sam was the last one back to the van, and I blocked the door with my shoulder and looked back at my brother, lifting an eyebrow. "C'mon, Sam. You're acting like I don't know you at all."

He crossed his arms and puffed a piece of hair out of his face. "I don't want to talk to you right now." He said grumpily.

I crossed my arms right back and leaned on the side of the door, still blocking him from going inside. "No, Sam, this is above our damn arguement. What's wrong?"

He rolled his eyes a little bit and pushed his fingers through his hair. "It's my...ugh, Dean, I can't believe you're making me say this but its my..._soul_, I guess." He coughed in embarrassment and covered his face with his palm, like he was thinking _this is beyond awkward. _"I didn't even want to talk to you, Dean, and you're making me explain-"

My eyes widened immediately and I gripped his shoulders, my eyes searching his weary face. He bit his lip and looked away. He hated telling me things when I didn't understand, but goddammit, shouldn't I have the right to know?

"I-I should probably just ask Kara about it. She knows the most out of all of us." He said quickly in embarrassment, trying to push past me and get into the camper.

"I'm your brother, goddammit, so what's wrong with it? You said like you felt you got wounded this morning, is it...y'know, painful, or I dunno, did you..._tear _it or something?" It was so frustrating that I couldn't always help me when it came to Projecting, but I really wanted to. All this worry and panic; damn, it sucked.

He shook his head, his hair flopping all over the place. "I can't _tear _it. It just kind of hurts, Dean, it's not a big deal. Really."

"But has this ever happened before?"

"Not to this degree, but...look, I'm fine. I'll just take it easy for a few days, okay?" Sam frowned. "I promise it's not too bad. I wouldn't lie to you."

"Okay." I let go and ran a hand through my damp hair. "Just let me know, alright? I'll make the phone call and set the appointment back a few more days."

He nodded and stuck his hands in his pockets, and the conversation was over. Sam made talking about complications in his projecting was just about as comfortable as discussing hemorrhoids with me.

* * *

><p>"Yes, would you mind listing some of her symptoms for me? I need it to be accurate so I can alter the specifics in my incantation to make sure I get this demon out in its entirety. Yes. I see." I dug through our files and pulled certain ones out and set them aside, and scribbled a few other notes on a yellow lined pad of paper balanced on my knee.<p>

We had a good amount of information by now, but that didn't mean we never ran into surprises still. It was best to try and get an idea about what we were dealing with. I usually was the one to make all the phone calls, just because if they actually had a religious question I could answer it.

"Thank you, sir. We'll be meeting with you in a about five or six days. Yes, we will give you an update. Thank you. God bless," That phrase still left a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth, and I was still working on saying it unironically. I hung up and tossed the phone haphazardly into the nestle of papers in the sink. "Alright, we got a case of paranoia, with the small possibility of schizophrenia up in Bismarck. I told them we'd be there in pretty soon."

"I thought we were supposed to head East," Kara asked, helping to try and organize the paper mess, shuffling a few loose papers into a stack. It was where we kept all the information we could; contraband documents, our own meticulous notes that we had accumulated over the past two years, clippings of newspaper articles, pretty much anything we thought might come in handy later.

"Well, we're going North, which should be safe enough." I replied, running my hand through my hair and letting out a small sigh. I still felt worn out from that awful nightmare last night of being eaten alive by a Laundromat-mouth. A Laundromouth (Ha!) I'd told Sam I didn't mind, I really didn't, but it had caused me to feel pretty exhausted.

"We'll start heading up that way, we'll stop for the night once the sun sets. We could all probably use some sleep." I placed the two folders I'd pulled aside and shoved the rest aside roughly. Goddammit, I was worrying again. If we ever were caught, I would probably be jailed for a few years, but the rest of the Projectors would be taken away, but I don't know where. No one does, and that uncertainty scares me like nothing else.

When the old camper van finally shuddered to a stop that night, I was beyond exhausted. After brushing my teeth and spitting into some bushes, I climbed up the ladder at a snail's pace and collapsed onto my bed, pushing myself beneath the mounds of blankets and cocooning up for the night.

Crickets trilled outside, and Sam's footsteps squeaked as he climbed up the ladder.

"Dean..." His voice was soft with embarrassment. "-Don't feel too good."

"What's wrong?" I mumbled, rubbing my face to try to wake myself up a little, but my eyes felt glued together already.

"I dunno." He replied. "You know what, it's probably nothing."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, I just want to get some sleep." He crawled under his covers on his futon.

_It probably is nothing, Dean. You worry too much as it is._

"Wake me up if you feel bad again, okay? I'll be right here." I replied.

"Mm," He replied and snuggled up under his covers. I had just began to slip into a cozy sleep when I heard a strangled yelp and a sickening gurgling sound. My eyes flicked open and I saw Sam sitting upright in the dark, both hands clasped firmly over his nose and mouth, some dark red oozing between his pale fingers.

I swore under my breath and scrambled out of bed, dropping to the lower part of the camper and grabbing a roll of paper towels.

When I came back up, Sam was motionless with his eyes squeezed shut and his hands firmly clamped over his nose. "Here," I said, and he took away his hands and I dabbed, scrubbing his mouth and under his nose to clean up the blood. He took in a wheezy breath; his eyes were still squeezed shut.

"Blow." I said softly, cupping the towel just underneath his nostrils. "But gently." He let out a blow with very little pressure, and I felt like he was a five-year-old with a cold again.

He finally ventured to open his eyes. I frowned and wiped his face again. "You _sure_ the thing can't tear?" I prompted again.

He sunk back down into his bed almost as if in defeat and nodded, his hair making a faint scrubbing noise on the pillowcase. He looked very small now, even though he was taller than me.

"That man, Dean. He did something to me. I've never felt anything like what he did before. Like…like he was some kind of spring-loaded rat trap that just _snapped_ on me. It was inhuman." He mumbled, shivering as he retold it. "That man…Dean, that man was…I don't think he _was_ human."

I reached out and felt his forehead. He actually did feel a little feverish, and he shivered again. "So what do you think he was?" I asked in a tight voice. Sam wouldn't make something like that up to me. He was always so truthful when it came to reiterating what he'd experienced Projecting to me.

"I don't…Jesus, I have no idea. A demon, maybe some kind of…I don't know." Sam closed his eyes and pulled the blankets closer. "I have a bad, bad feeling about that man, Dean."

"He hurt you." I restated.

Sam nodded. "Somehow. I don't know how." He sighed. "I'm sorry I was mad at you. I just...it was hard to wrap my head around, y'know? I'm sorry."

"It's all right. And I don't think you should go working this next job." I said sternly, but was gentle as I pushed a clean paper towel into his hand. "Here. Just in case."

"Can we see how I feel in five days?" Sam spoke up meekly, dabbing the towel underneath his nose and looking up at me. He was such a stubborn kid. A lot like me, actually. He was a lot tougher than I usually gave him credit for.

"You're so damn stubborn." I snorted. "Maybe. You're only going back out there if you're feeling one-hundred percent, got it?"

"Mmhm." He hummed and shut his eyes again.

"You haven't had a nosebleed like that since we were little." I pointed out nervously.

"I'm okay now." He replied, speaking in hushed tones. "What he did…it doesn't hurt so much anymore."

"Just making sure. Get some rest, okay? We'll figure out this…weird guy later." I placed my palm just above his ear, giving his head a little rub. He seemed to relax a little at that, knowing I'd be there again if anything went wrong. "You fucking scared me."

"Sorry," He mumbled sadly, and then pulled his on covers and turned away from me with a rustle.

_Cas, I let your sorry ass go. So you better not pull a fast one on us_. I silently prayed before I tried to let myself be swallowed up with sleep.

…..

"Dean? Hey, can you hear me? Wake up!" I woke up to Kara violently shaking me. Her voice was tight and her chin quivered, her shiny brown eyes searching my face, flitting back and forth. I blinked back at her in surprise. I hadn't seen that expression on her for a long time.

"What? What is it?" I scrambled up and my heart began to race.

"It's Sam, he…" Kara stopped herself and pressed her lips together in a watery frown.

"Oh my God-" I pushed all of my blankets off of me roughly and we both dropped to the lower tier of the camper.

Levi had taken Sam's face in his hands and had slapped his cheeks a few times, and would shake his shoulders. Sam's head flopped back and forth listlessly like a doll's. He was propped up with his back to one of the couches. Levi must have been to one to carry him down here.

"He's not waking up." Levi's eyebrows drew together, his big hand resting on Sam's shoulder. Levi tried gently rubbing the hairs on the top of his head, like he's seen me do multiple times before. He was also mumbling into his ear, I could hear the low tones rolling in the air, but I couldn't decipher his words.

"Wake him up. I don't care what you have to do." I commanded him.

"We might have to take him to the hospital." Levi said, glancing for a second up and me and then flicked his eyes back down to Sam. "This looks bad. If we're there, at least we'll know the body won't die as quickly."

_The __body__?_ Why in the world did he think it was okay to refer to my brother as 'the body'? "Just wait a minute, he can find his way back-" I insisted.

"Dean, you don't know what it's _like_!" Levi snapped at me. "Right now, this body is soulless! Something is happening to Sam so that he can't find his way back, and his functions are starting to fail, so unless we bring him to the hospital, this body _will_ die!"

I didn't respond. I couldn't. His words felt like they'd slapped me across the face, and I sat there in stunned silence.

The van started up again, and Kara pulled out into the road again with a few pops of the gravel. Levi was still trying effortlessly to wake Sam up. For some reason, I was afraid to touch him. His pallor reminded me of a corpse, and for me to feel his lifeless skin would make _this_ real. This whole thing felt rubbery, like it hadn't set in yet. I didn't want that sharpness of reality to set in. I was too scared, too cowardly.

"Dean, Levi, I have to pull over." Kara pleaded after about five minutes of driving, twisting partway backwards to talk to us. "We can't go too far away, or..." She trailed off, not wanting to say it.

"He'll get _lost_?" I demanded angrily. "Is that it?!" She swung the car off to the side of the road more roughly than she really should have, and scrambled into the backseat.

"Sam." I knelt down in front of Sam and gently pushed past Levi. He easily let me. I finally cupped the sides of his face, and immediately noticed how cold he'd gotten. The skin on his face felt like he'd just stepped in from a snowstorm.

"Hey, I don't know if you can hear me. We stopped the car, okay?" I smudged my thumb on his cheek, his skin felt like cold wax. _Oh, my God. __What if I really do lose him? What if his soul really can't find its way back?_

"Sammy, please. Your body's dying."

_What if I lost my only brother?_

_Please, God._

Sam stirred slightly before he breathed in a huge gasp of air, sounding like a drowning person's first breath. His chest heaved, his arms shot out and splayed to his sides, his hands gripped the blankets behind him in a vice grip. His eyes darted rapidly to the three of our faces, dark pupils tiny pinpricks in a sea of green.

"Oh, Christ... _Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto_..." I muttered under my breath in relief, covering my nose and mouth within the triangle of my palms, and my eyes forced themselves closed. _Sam, goddammit, never scare me like that again__._

"C-co-cold-" Sam sputtered, hugging his arms tightly to his chest and shivering violently.

"Here," Kara grabbed a blanket and spread it out for him, wrapping him up in the blanket and a hug simultaneously, pumping her hand up and down his shoulder.

"Get him another one." Kara told Levi, who nodded, stood up and started grabbing all the blankets and quilts off of his own bed. I sat there with my hands on my knees, not quite sure what to do. I just let myself be surrounded by relief for a moment, letting it wash away all that awful, acidic panic.

The two of them heaped a mountain of blankets onto Sam, who curled them around himself tightly until he was just a little face sticking out of a multicolored mound.

"You all right?" I asked as he seemed like his eyes were staring blankly right through me. He nodded slightly, his head just barely bobbing up and down. "Do you want some tea?" He did that tiny, minuscule bob again and I straightened up. If I could keep my hands busy, maybe I'd feel a little bit better about this whole situation.

"Why is he so cold?" I asked Levi and Kara, desperately searching for answers for a subject I knew barely anything about. "What's wrong with him?"

"Nothing," Kara reassured me. "Souls run hot, if you go without one for a while it's cold. Especially if there's a complication, his body didn't keep itself as warm as it usually does. When our warm soul leaves, our body compensates- it goes into a sympathetic state to keep us alive, it pumps our hearts faster, raises our core temperatures, makes our eyes go all…well, you know."

"So he…it just didn't do that this time." I tried to understand. She bit her lip and nodded. I filled the teapot and put it on the stove, looking at Kara as I waited for it to boil. "Listen, Kara.." I said under my breath, leaning on the counter with my back to Sam, trying to close him off. "I'm thinking about making him take a break. I mean, indefinitely."

"You know damn well he won't stand for that." Kara frowned, leaning closer to me. "-But I have to agree with you."

"He's only _nineteen_ for God's sake." I whispered the age part, practically mouthed it. I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, a habit I picked up from Dad. "He's just not skilled or old enough to keep up with you two." I whispered. "Especially you."

"Hey, I didn't ask to know my way around projecting, okay?" Kara pinched her lip between two fingers, her own nervous gesture, then crossed her arms over her chest. "So what do we do about it?"

"I dunno, Kara. Maybe you can talk to him about it. Use your mothering skills to get him to listen to some reason." I pushed my hand through the hair on the side of my skull and leaned onto my elbow, propped on a cabinet.

She rolled her laughing eyes. "Oh, please. I'm not any of you boys' damn mother, okay?"

"I know. You always say that." I mustered up a very tiny grin at her, but I could tell it was much too weary to be even remotely convincing. "Just try and talk to him? If he won't listen to me?"

"Okay, Dean." She searched my face with her shiny black eyes. "There's no guarantees I can convince him, though."

I nodded at her and she went outside to go be with Levi. My arms felt like they weren't mine as I went through the motions of taking off the boiling water kettle and pouring it into a cup. I tread very softly over to him and handed him the cup, he wordlessly curled his fingers around it and refused to look up at me, and I stared at his zig-zagged part.

I wet my lips with a sweep of my tongue. "Sam," I started, swallowing back a lump in my throat. My voice was a dry hush. "I gotta...I have to tell you something."

"Yeah," He replied, his head still bowed as if in shame.

"You have to…I need you to take it easy for a little while. Just until you're back on your feet." I tried to break it to him as gently as possible.

He was silent as he sat and shivered in his mound of blankets. He finally sucked in a small breath and spoke up. "…I'm f-"

"No, you're _not_ fine." I interrupted him, my tone a lot stricter than I'd been intending.

"I want to help-!" He began wearily.

"_No_." I replied and bit down hard on my teeth so I wouldn't say what I had been thinking; he wasn't exactly the most valuable player anyway. "Until I say you can start again, you're benched, Samuel-"

"-_You_ can't _call_ me that and don't- just don't!" He snapped. "You're _not_ Dad so stop acting like it!" He set down his tea and buried his face in his hands.

"I know I'm not Dad." I sat down next to him. "I know."

I came and sat down next to him, careful to not spill the little paper cup of tea. He had his fingers pushed up into his thick hair with his palms digging into his eyes, and his shoulders were still shaking. I locked my fingers together and stared at them. My knuckles were still healing, the skin was itchy and pinkish along the scabs that had peeled off a little while ago.

"I didn't ask for this either, okay?" I said quietly. He sighed and dragged his hands down to form a triangle over his mouth, where he finally let them fall from his face.

"I know." He said quietly. "I'm getting worse. It's like I'm backtracking instead of learning. God_dammit_- we still taking that job in Bismarck?" Sam asked and held his forehead with one hand in frustration.

"_We_ are. You aren't." I corrected him. "End of story."

"Damn," Sam scrubbed his face in his palms. "Not even-"

"Sam, I swear to God I'm not changing my mind." I handed him his tea again. "I'll put some whiskey in this if that'll help take the edge off."

"We haven't seen a drop since that ultra bonus and you know it," Sam shook his head. Boy, did I remember that day.

Yeah, that had been a good day, one of the best on the road. It had been the time we got such a large bonus from some rich man after we'd cured his suicidal daughter that we pretended to shower ourselves with bills of cash as the car sped down the highway, and I'd felt like some kind of bandit in the Old West who'd just successfully robbed a train. We went out and bought a big-ass bottle of expensive 80 proof vodka with our new money. We'd ran and stumbled around in a big field we'd found, and everyone kissed everyone else and laughed into each other's shoulders and spun around until we got so dizzy we had to lie down. We'd finished the entire bottle that night, just the four of us.

I remembered Levi stumbling through lush grass that came up to his knees, his inked arms spread out wide, tipping them from side to side like a little kid imitating an airplane. His hair had looked like it was on fire in the thinning orange dusk light. We'd fallen asleep under the sky that seemed a lot darker than usual- and had so many mosquito bites the next morning we could barely walk. I remembered laying down in that field; the world and the stars were spinning above me, damp blades of grass had been pressed to my back, and I'd been feeling my stomach turning over and over again from the alcohol but I didn't care about how ill I felt. I had just been listening to the irregular rhythm of different people breathing around me- and even though it was very, very dark I never felt fear that night, not even once.

Those were the good days, all right.

"Yeah. Levi still asks everyday if we have milk even though he knows the answer. Sometimes it makes it easier to pretend that things are different then they really are." I nudged his shoulder.

"Well, maybe we can just start making moonshine or something." Sam smirked wearily at me.

"Moonshi-? Do you even- you're nineteen, okay, shuddup." I motioned to his paper cup once again and couldn't manage to hide my smile. "Drink your damn tea, Sammy."


	8. Chapter 8

I'm back! Hopefully I am not being too slow with revealing clues to solve this whole mystery...please let me know what you think! Thanks for reading!

* * *

><p>I took the keys from the counter, opened the door and stepped outside, shut it, locked it and just sat out in front of the camper. I pulled up my hoodie to encompass my face and huffed, staring at the scuffed toes of my boots and tried to relax my shoulders that felt like they were strung tight like a piano wire.<p>

I couldn't explain it: I'd just been feeling uncomfortable in my own skin all morning. I felt jittery inside, I couldn't seem to sit in one place for long. I felt a dark kind of insidiousness pressing up against me, the feeling of something hanging over my head that I couldn't see that was going to fall down and crush me at any second. I shuddered and tugged the zipper down the front of my hoodie a little farther up my chest. I just needed to get out- just leave for a little while.

Across the street from the run-down park the camper was squatted on was a single story strip mall with a disproportionately large parking lot, that you could tell by just looking at it that it was never completely full. All the shops looked closed except for a dimly lit 7/11.

I kicked a rock by my feet and it went jumping away across the street, skittering to a stop just before the wide vertical mouth of a gutter. _You're fine. Everything's fine. _

A huddled group of teenagers laughed a little ways off and I kept walking further away down the street. Scrape, scrape went Levi's handcuffs along his metal pole. I sighed and stood up again, I had to get a little further away. I went up to a concrete bench and sat down, the concrete felt as cold as ice. I breathed a sigh and crossed my ankles, looking up. The moon was like a tiny fingernail had punctured the darkening sky.

It was peaceful out here. Only a few cars passed by, but the street bathed in amber was mostly still. A dark tree branch bobbed in the slight wind. My mind felt like it was being filled with fog, but I didn't want to go back to the camper just yet. I rested my head on the back of the bench and looked at the bluish sky laced with the black leaves above. My heavy eyelids forced themselves closed.

_Everything was fine. Everything was going to be fine._ I felt myself drifting off. _Sam was only speculating, when he said that thing about Castiel not being human. We can't know that for sure. Everything's...everything is going to be..._

I have no idea how much time had passed when my body jerked and I woke up with a gasp, shivering in the cold.

_Fuck._

That little word went off like a warning bell in my head, causing me to bolt upright. It was still dark. _Where am I? Crap, I'd really fallen asleep on that park bench?_

"Holy shit." The phrase fell out of my mouth, a knee-jerk reaction. The first thing I thought-

"Levi." I mumbled again, my mouth talking for me like I was drunk or something. Panic jolted down my spine, my heart begining to race, and I scrambled to get up and race back to the camper. "Levi-"

My mouth tasted fowl, the signature taste after a long nap. I smacked my mouth a few times, but hustled back down to where I knew the camper was parked. That strange, looming feeling was long gone, but panic was sharp and cutting. It was probably nothing, the spiky feeling in the pit of my stomach might just be the lingering remnants of a nightmare my mind had forgotten about, or...

I dug the keys from my pocket and with wobbly hands tried to unlock the door, until I noticed it was already hanging slightly ajar. Maybe I'd just forgotten to lock it on my way out, maybe I had just been careless-

_Empty_.

My body felt like it had been doused in ice water. The bed on the couch below the window was empty, he was gone, his rumpled purple comforter the only thing left behind.

And a snapped metal pole.

"Sammy! Kara!" I screamed, my heart hammering hard against my ribs. This had never happened before, not even once. He'd always been able to keep himself in check. My hands found my head and I knotted my fingers into my hair, tugging painfully on the roots.

"Dean-?" I heard Kara groan from her bed toward the back of the camper.

"He's gone." My voice was trembling almost as much as I was. "Get up, _now_. Hurry. He could be anywhere."

I snatched up the car keys on the counter, and spotted Levi's handcuff keys there too, and just those little silver thing made my insides twist into something worse. I hopped into the driver's seat and quickly turned on the ignition, and the old engine coughed to life. Kara came in beside me, her eyes wide. "He really..." She trailed off, as if she wasn't quite sure what she was going to say in the first place.

I rarely drove this car, and the driver's seat was molded to Levi's larger shape. It made me feel sick.

The car jumped forward and I heard a sliding and thump from behind me. "Oof!" Sam let out a low groan, which turned into a forced out "-I'm good!" It would have been funny, usually.

That awful feeling of not even knowing where to look hit me, and my breathing hitched as we gunned it down the dark roads. Kara was silently staring ahead, rolling her hands nervously in her lap.

"We're gonna find him." She spoke in a soft, scared tone. "We will, okay?" She squeezed my bicep reassuringly. This girl was an truly a Godsend.

_Warmer_.

I didn't question how or why that word had rung through my brain just now, reverberating like a bell. Right now, I really didn't give a fuck about why I'd woken up in the first place, how I knew it was Levi before I'd even seen the snapped pole or empty bed, any of this. I just needed my friend to be okay, to get him back.

"Dean," Kara still clung with one arm to mine, but with the other she pointed to a group of men standing in a circle in one of the empty parking lots. As we got closer, I made out that they weren't just 'standing' at all- one man was furiously kicking another man who was on the ground, curled up into himself, the others were trying hard to get the attacker to stop.

"Holy shit," Kara breathed. "Go- turn here."

The van shuddered over the small cement divider as I made a highly illegal turn and the tires squealed as we gunned it into the parking lot. We arrived just in time for the mass of men to pull Levi off of one of them and throw him to the asphalt once more.

"Fuck! Hey! Stop!" I screamed, kicking open the door and running over as fast as I could, lungs burning as I heaved out breaths. As I pumped my arms and legs and came closer, Levi tried to shove his way out of the circle of punches and kicks. Without breaking pace I threw myself at the circle, shoving to try and get through, but strong arms shoved equally hard back and I fell to the ground. My ribs throbbed from someone's arm, as if I'd ran right into a pole.

"Look at this dumbass, this your boyfriend?" The toe of one of the men's boots dug into the soft space just under my ribs. I quickly tried to rise, my side screaming in pain and I clasped a hand over it. Yeah, that'd leave a bruise.

"Let him go," I stood my ground, my fists curled angrily, squaring off against him. Goddammit, he was taller than me.

"Or _what_?" He sneered. "Your boy here came out of nowhere, trying to mess with us. We're not done yet, so you can wait your turn to suck his-"

I threw the perfect punch, and I felt his nose break under my fist. Some of his blood was sticky against my fingers. He doubled over, hands forming a triangle over his nose, groaning in agony.

"Levi-" But he'd slipped out of the circle at the distraction. I watched as he made his way into the little darkened strip mall this parking lot belonged to, long legs pumping hard. Kara and Sam were running after him, but I felt strong hands pinch at my biceps. I spun around and jerked out of their grasp, but more were wherever I turned.

"_Hey_!" A man tried to grab for me, and he managed to grip onto my shoulder. I shoved him off and darted out of his grasp , beginning to book it towards the mall.

"Dammit, grab him!" I heard the group of men yelling at each other.

"Forget it," The man with the broken nose spoke nasally. "All of 'em are fuckin' crazy anyway."

I tried to look for Levi, but those few seconds had been too long. I'd lost him.

I waited for some kind of word to pop into my head again, but nothing came.

_I lost him._ Panic gripped me once again as I ran past the darkened stores, then jogged, then just stopped. I rested my hands on my knees and panted, air burning up my throat, squeezing my eyes shut. _Please_, I prayed. _Just give me a word again, I don't know who you are, or __what__ you are...I need something._

_Maybe it's Angels_, I thought suddenly. Maybe this thing we're doing, maybe this really is the Lord's work.

Wow, now I can see how panic can make people crazy. Angels were not known to be subtle creatures like this, well, according to the Bible. If some kind of celestial being really was watching out for us, no doubt they would have come down by now with their five faces, eyeballed-pinions on massive wings and spinning wheels (which may or may not be aflame) and tell me "Be not afraid" as I promptly would shit my pants. No, it wasn't going to be Angels. We're the 'Bad Guys', remember?

The Lord's work. _Pffft_. I'm much dumber than I thought, apparently.

"Dean! Over here!" Sam called out, and I straightened up again. I wiped my sweaty forehead and jogged my way toward where the voice had come from. Kara and Sam stood side-by-side, looking at a home cooking store window that was completely shattered, and a trail of blood started on the ground, fat garnet droplets had spattered onto the cement.

"He's in here." Kara told me. "We follow the blood now."

The glass crunched as we ducked down and crawled very carefully through the broken window, Kara kicked in a few larger pieces with her boot and they tinkled to the floor. The store was very dark, and the aisles very straight and symmetrical. The trail of blood looked like ink blobs in the dark, and being in the empty, silent store was eerie. My heart leapt to my throat when we finally found him again, there he sat with his long legs stretched in front of him in one of the aisles. He had his back resting against a shelf with food processors. He looked so out of place here; he was bleeding, dirty and disheveled among the clean organized mixers and mopped white speckled tiles on the floor. He was staring off into space. That or he was completely mesmerized by a set of wooden stirring spoons.

"Levi!" I hurried over and knelt down in front of him, clasping his wrists and staring into his blank face, into his strange off-balanced eyes. Levi had a pair of kitchen shears with a black plastic handle clasped in one hand, and from the other hand dangled his glinting silver handcuffs like some kind of twisted Halloween costume.

Tiny copper-brown tufts and tiny curls of hair were perched on his shoulders and surrounding him, the fluffy chunks tumbling soundlessly around his shoes at the smallest displacement of air. His hands and forearms were bleeding from the shattered window, and he'd wiped blood in his newly butchered hair, where it sat sticky and dark.

"I'm sorry I crashed the car, God, I'm so sorry," Levi seemed to have calmed down after his rampage and he looked up at me with an immeasurably guilty expression, looking straight into my eyes with his caramel off-balance ones. His voice came out clear as a bell, and for a minute I was almost convinced that's exactly what we were supposed to be talking about. "I didn't mean to, I swear, but I was drunk and I thought I could do it…" Levi cradled his cheek shamefully in the palm of his hand, a devastated look on his face.

"Your arms, Lev, oh my god." I stepped back and ran a hand exasperatedly down my face. "Oh, Jesus, we might need to get him to a hospital."

"It was broken when I found it!" Levi insisted, shaking his hands with his palms up. He'd smeared a little more red blood on his cheek. "_Please_, you gotta believe me!" He begged. It was surreal; the words coming from his mouth were said with such conviction, yet it was all nonsense. It was like I was walking into the middle of a conversation, although I'd been here the whole time. It scared me.

"Kara, help me out here. We have to get him back to the van, I have to take all this glass out of him. Come on," I spoke to Levi now, gently taking his wrist with the scissors and wriggling them softly from his limp fingers. "Come on, Lev. I know you can hear me just a little bit."

"I'm going to miss you," The absolute certainty in which Levi said those words made a chill run down my spine. The emotions were very real; the sadness on his face, the loneliness shining in his eyes. "Please don't leave me."

We managed to pull him stumbling back to the camper, where I flung open the door and helped him to take a step up and the rest of us piled in with him. I guided him by the shoulders and led him to the row of seats beneath the window he uses for a bed. I saw his snapped pole and I feel my guts writhe. Levi's face looked significantly pale, blood slipping down in garnet, veiny lines down his greenish tattoos and dripping down his fingers, the droplets swelling and dripping down to patter on the floor.

I turned to Sam; a wrinkle was forming between his light-colored eyebrows. "Sam, I need you to get the tranquilizer." I said, and my stomach twisted again.

"Dean, we don't know what that will do to a sleepwalker." Sam answered quietly, wringing his hands together. "It might make it worse."

Sam could be right. Now, he was in a normal sleep. But who knows what could happen if we gave him the tranquilizer we usually reserved for our most difficult, most thrashy patients? It might be days before he was himself again.

"It's not going to get much worse than this, Sammy. Find it and bring it to me. Now." I just short of snarled, using my all-business tone and lowering my voice so there was no disputing that what I've told him is an order. Sam scrunched up his face and got up and to search for the small box where we keep the hypodermic needle and tranquilizer serum.

"Kara, is there any way you can get in there? Wake him up?" I asked softly as Sam opened another drawer and dug around inside, looking for that silver box with the gold cross, yet another "façade item" we use to disguise what we really do.

"I've already tried." Kara sighed. "I can't figure it out myself, his soul is halfway from his body and half in, and I can't...get in when someone is awake. And his soul is not separated enough that I can go in." Finally, Sam handed me the box silently over my shoulder. His big, boyish hands were shaking.

Kara shook her head, her sheet of black hair swayed softly along her shoulders. "Dean, I-I don't know what to do." Her voice was small and meek, not something I was used to hearing from her. I wordlessly took the kit from my brother, undid the buckles and threw it open. The needle and the serum were perfectly nestled in their little horizontal spots.

I took out the needle and pushed it through the top of the serum, pulling up the clear liquid to a certain bar and then flicked the sharp tip, where a fat bead of liquid rolled out.

"What's going on?" Levi mumbled to himself.

"Hold his arm," I commanded both Sam and Kara, and they both held his arm in place without dispute.

"Sorry, bud." I said through gritted teeth and jammed the needle into the meat of his bicep, just below his tattoo of a serpent that splits into two heads and just above his family crest . I slowly pushed the plunger down, trying as hard as I could to keep my hand steady, and the liquid sunk lower and lower until I took out the needle with a tense sigh. Levi's words died on his lips, his eyes fluttered closed, and he slumped over on himself. We all waited in the silence and disbelief for a moment.

I was the one to speak up first, carefully wetting my lips with a sweep of my tongue before speaking quietly and in a controlled manner.

"If one of you would like to help me clean off the floor while I take out the shards and bandage his arms, that would be very helpful."

"It wasn't your fault." Sam piped up almost immediately, because he knows that's what I'm thinking. That I should have paid more attention, I should have known the metal on the pole was getting dangerously thin by looking at it and replacing it should have been at the top of my list, it was my job to look after them, all of that. But it_ is _my fault.

As much as it hurt, I ignored him.

"I think we have some hydrogen peroxide in the bottom drawer with the first aid kit." I bit out, and put the needle back into the box. I shut it very, very slowly.

* * *

><p>Levi woke up around five in the afternoon the next day.<p>

Sam was back there reading and keeping an eye on him. "Guys!" Sam called to the front of the car, where Kara and I were in the driver's and passenger's seats.

Kara swung the camper off to the side of the road and we both scrambled to get back there. Levi moaned a little, and brought a hand up to gingerly touch his temple.

"God, was I hit with a cinderblock?" He mumbled, and I could tell just by his tone that he was him again. It was nothing like that hollow tone and completely detached, strange snippets of disconnected conversation. By the time I saw him he looked very confused and was examining his arms, which I'd wrapped up to the elbow in an ace bandages with only his fingers peeking out. He tipped his head to look at the other arm, which was wrapped similarly.

His gaze fell on me, and he looked scared and much younger in that instant. Then he looked away to the ceiling, and shut his eyes again, as if he were ashamed.

"Hey, hey!" I shook his shoulder. "Don't fall asleep again. Lev? Is it you?"

Levi blinked slowly, taking in a deep rattling breath. "Dean…?" Levi asked in a hushed voice, his eyebrows drawing together and he looked terrified as his eyes darted around the camper and to my face. "What did I do?" He whispered.

"You're back?" Kara asked, her voice watery, and Levi blinked at her and then looked to his injured arms again.

"I-I don't know what I'm back from." He replied in a soft voice, dipping his head in shame and staring at his wrapped arms again. "I don't remember getting these."

"Did I hurt anyone?" Levi asked, looking around to make sure he could see all of our faces. He saw the worn-down pole snapped cleanly in the middle. "Oh." He said in more of a sigh than a word.

"What did I do?" Levi repeated, and then one of his hands wandered up to his head, and he ran his hand through his hair that was crusty with dried blood and cut so badly that it looked like a preschooler had set to it. The cuts were jagged and uneven, and I was pretty sure I could make out a few bald spots. "Oh my god." Levi ran a faster hand through the butchered hair once again, as if to double-check. His eyes flicked to me and Kara and they looked sunken, like he was tired with life.

"It'll grow back." Kara said softly, swallowing back her tears and rubbing her nose. "I'll see what I can do with it after dinner."

"I used a pair of kitchen shears." Levi recalled slowly, sitting up with a slight moan and staring at the fingers peeking out of his wraps and knitting them together. "...It was a culinary store."

"Yes," Kara replied. "Do you remember anything else?"

"I… I don't know." Levi shut his eyes again. "I don't know what was real and made its way into my dream. I thought dogs had chewed up my arms and that's where the pain was coming from," He attempted to laugh, but it came out more like a pathetic huff.

"Dogs?" I asked. He might as well have been talking about dinosaurs. No one has seen any dogs since before the Rapture. What, you think those creatures who love pretty much unconditionally wouldn't have been good enough during the Reaping? Please.

"Yeah." Levi covered his embarrassed face with his wrapped forearm and tried to laugh. "Dogs, of all damn things."

"Anywhere else hurt?" I asked, crouching down and squinting at him, inspecting him.

"Not really." Levi sighed. "My head, a little bit. That's all."

After dinner Sam and I watched Kara attempted to fix Levi's hair, pinching tufts between her two fingers and snipping crazily to try and make the straight-across cuts look a little more natural. They were talking, but I was too far away to pick up on what they were saying.

"I say we take a break." I said, coming up to sit next to Sam. "It's been a record month, three people in the past two weeks even. We deserve at least that."

"But for how long?" Sam asked, digging the white rubber toe of his Converse into the dirt nervously. "If we stay in one place too long-"

"Just until Levi's bandages can come off. It wouldn't hurt you either to take a little break, either. I think you're moving too fast too, with the Projecting." I said, once again trying not to be insensitive.

Sam shrugged. "I just… Dean, without this job, without helping, things just feel..."

"I know. Bad." I interrupted.

"I was about to say melancholy-" Sam began very sarcastically.

I had to crack a smile and nudged his shoulder. "Dork."

Sam shrugged and continued to twist and dig the white rubber toe of his sneaker into the dirt. I cleared my throat.

"Do you really think he's some kind of demon? Castiel, I mean?" I began. I wanted to blame all of my fretting yesterday on this question, but deep down I knew that hadn't been all there was to it. I didn't really want to think about why my mind had forced me outside, made me feel like something bad was going to happen all day, telling me where to find Levi- I shook my head at myself. No, I wasn't going to worry about that now.

"I don't know." Sam shook his head and avoided my eyes, bringing his hand up and knotting his fingers in his brown hair. He was frustrated, I could tell.

"He didn't feel like a normal person, you know? And yeah, I was prodding around in his memories, searching for where he was and what his leads were on us, y'know, useful stuff and I…I felt something…like there was _someone_ else there. I just barely touched it, maybe I didn't even touch it, just got close enough to feel it and…_wham_. Just- like I was saying, spring loaded rat-trap. _Damn_, it hurt." Sam scrubbed at the back of his neck nervously. "I'm curious too. But fuck if I'm not scared out of my mind to go back in there. I don't think I could."

That settled it- Castiel was possessed. I felt a jolt down my spine- I _could_ have killed it when I had the chance. How could there have been a demon inside him all along and I hadn't been able to tell? He didn't reek of evil and sin that made my skin crawl like the other two times I'd ever encountered a real, living demon before. This whole thing was so strange…God, and those grey, drowned-person eyes…

Sam gave me a dark blue sidelong glance. "Think he's…you know…"

"If you're going to ask me if you think he's possessed, then yes." I spoke up over him as his voice began to fade. "And if he ever shows his face near us again, I'll finally-"

"Don't." Sam quietly interrupted me. "Just don't say it, Dean, alright?"

I pressed my lips together and nodded. Those eight faces of bloodied, pale faces of those Churchmembers flashed before my eyes. And I still didn't feel a damned thing.


End file.
